I was just curious if anyone has played the Mage class on the console version of Dragon Age. Specifically the Spirit Healer. I'm wanting to give that class a try, but I'm worried about the difficulty of selecting one of my party members, and healing them quickly. 
Has the game been streamlined enough to where it's easy to do that? Is there some specific method you have to figure out in order to quickly heal a party member? I've only played melee classes so far, so I don't really know much about how you target fellow party members, and cast a beneficial ability on them.
 
Thanks in advance!

To heal, as a mage, you can hotkey it, or, what I do is:
1.) Press LT, to pause the game
2.) Go to spells, and select heal
3.) The game remains paused, and an you choose which member to heal using their portraits on the upper left
4.) Press A, the game goes back to the action and the selected party member gets healed.

Yeah Being a Spirit Healer is pretty good, but when playing the role of the mage it is important to look at what level of difficulty you are playing.  The cool thing about the magic settings in this game is that you can actually do friendly fire.  I think that is what makes this game truly different from other great RPG's like Fable 1 and 2, Divinity 1 and 2, and the finial fantasy series.  I also would advise against wasting a specialty point on the shape shift ability, kind of lame.  Although keep in mind if you are using a mage make sure he is always in the back  and you have some really kick ass melee guys, other wise your gonna die, a lot.

  I also would advise against wasting a specialty point on the shape shift ability, kind of lame.  Although keep in mind if you are using a mage make sure he is always in the back  and you have some really kick ass melee guys, other wise your gonna die, a lot. "

It works great, once you get use to it your a master of it.

It shouldn't be hard. As someone mentioned, you can pause the game and select allies/switch spells/target enemies/ etc. The harder part of playing a mage is having tanks to protect you. It takes a bit more micromanagement but it's not outrageously hard :).