POE2 is a golden opportunity for building your own build.

It's unexplored. I m pretty sure the tree is pretty easy to figure out "what is efficient". what nodes to aim for etc. it looks pretty easy to optimize too.

if you've been following builds all thru out POE1's history, if you want to experience the joy (and frustrations) of building your OWN build from scratch. POE2 is a perfect place to do it.

personally speaking i've been tweaking my own build which only became better recently when ggg buffed melee damage.

i would say its definitely not the best build but i've accomplished a lot with it. i've recently hit 100 for the first time ever and i've cleared the feared for the first time ever. all on a temp league without access to my legacy gear.

i m not going to be able to kill ubers with my build. but it is my build, i could optimize it, reduce my offense and add more defences etc. but i m satisfied that ive cleared most of the game. the feeling of making something that "works" is different from just following a build.

to me i come from the mindset where if you follow a build, the game is playing you rather than the other way around. i want to play the game. "solving" the game by making your own build is a puzzle game with 1001 pieces for you to try and fix. admittedly my build only "worked" because of the recent damage buff but still. i ll take it as win. it is MY build. i made this.

and i come from a unique place where i've been playing POE for 10 years where the game evolved to where it is today. if i had never played POE and just started somewhere 1-2 years ago. i think i would never have tried making my own build. theres just so much to learn and theres too many ways to fail. even my recent success is just because of the damage buff, else it would have remained a failure for 10 years.

growing together with the game made me temper my expectations. but if i came in blind from the get go i probably wouldnt have liked POE as the "best" way to play the game was to follow a starter build. then farm up to finally play the real build that you wanted. or something along that line.

if you didnt follow a build, you would progress slower, you would accomplish less, and for newer players playing a temp league, they were on a timer. if you wanted to enjoy the game, you were encouraged heavily to optimize. following build guides is the best way to optimize. failure to optimize meant you could not enjoy harder content and many newer players could get stuck even on yellow tier maps.

in poe2 EA we no longer are on a "timer" per se. we know that we're going to reroll and restart everything when the game relaunches officially. its the perfect time to explore the game at your own pace and not worry about metas.

then again i do realize that some people prefer to just not worry about all the details and just follow a build guide. my opinion is a mere suggestion. an alternate way to experience and enjoy the game. this is the BEST time to experience this. i would implore you not to rob yourself of this joy. this is not something you can experience all the time. dont min max yourself out of this enjoyment.

but if min maxing is your thing, nothing wrong with that too. different people enjoy things differently.

I agree...I'm excited to not have to feel like I need to follow a build at the launch of EA.

Of course that'll probably only last until EA is over (or the first week/2) and then once we go full blown launch there will be an ultimate optimized version of my build that I probably didn't figure out that gives me 200% more damage or something dumb. Lol

I'll enjoy it while it lasts though!

i'm sure there will be guides put out within the first week by people who already played the game and solved it...

i have around 20k hours in PoE i have never tried to make my own build it was too hars of system for new people to try out their own builds but in PoE 2 its easy to respec skilltree easier to swap gems aswell so i wanna try make my own builds and and i wanna see if i can do all content with my own build the only problem is there are still alot of complex mechanic how some things work and if i dont understand how something work i cant learn it you only remember things how work if you know how they work so i dont know how to get past that issue i have watched bunch of videos about different mechanics in poe 2 like how mitigation works or how leech cap works and stuff like that but i just cant understand it

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Lyutsifer665#1671 wrote:

i'm sure there will be guides put out within the first week by people who already played the game and solved it...

no one will have solved anything in the first week are you crazy? this is completely new game with new builds it will take for people entire EA to keep discovering new builds

I've never followed build before, an not going to start now. I understand that hyper-optimized characters may make some people happy, but I play for my own enjoyment, so organically building and experimenting with skills is part of my fun. If I fail, I fail. If I succeed, I've done it myself. Just my thought.

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Deviant#8289 wrote:

no one will have solved anything in the first week are you crazy? this is completely new game with new builds it will take for people entire EA to keep discovering new builds

maybe i remember wrong but arent there some people like streamers who were given the game early to play? i'm sure these people already prepared videos to post as soon as the EA launches

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Lyutsifer665#1671 wrote:

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Deviant#8289 wrote:

no one will have solved anything in the first week are you crazy? this is completely new game with new builds it will take for people entire EA to keep discovering new builds

maybe i remember wrong but arent there some people like streamers who were given the game early to play? i'm sure these people already prepared videos to post as soon as the EA launches

doesnt matter they will have scratched only surface people are still gonna discover new op builds all the time it will take several months for people to discover good bunch of builds and even then theres more to discover not to mention this is just EA they will add far more new skills and support gems in full release there can be literally thousands of builds

I'm playing an Eye Of Winter build for full D2 nostalgia.

It looks pretty powerful. Either going blood mage or ele sorc, still undecided.

Going to try to get extremely high amounts of slow through temp chains and freeze / chill.

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Lyutsifer665#1671 wrote:

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Deviant#8289 wrote:

no one will have solved anything in the first week are you crazy? this is completely new game with new builds it will take for people entire EA to keep discovering new builds

maybe i remember wrong but aren't there some people like streamers who were given the game early to play? I'm sure these people already prepared videos to post as soon as the EA launches

They mostly only seen act 1 and 2. and they didn't have access to most things. So while they are theory crafting somewhat, they are largely unable to make any sort of actual builds they can recommend due to fact most of what is on skill tree is unknown, much of ascendancies are still unknown. Majority of uniques in game is still unknown, only a couple uniques dropped during those play sessions. Most of what those people have seen is already posted and known about to public too as they shared their videos of them playing and so on. I follow some streamers who basically been to nearly every LA event and they still only know a tiny fraction and not even remotely enough info to make any kind of build guide or even theory craft one yet.

If anyone claims they have a build guide right now, they simply don't and are trying to click bait.

This is a brand new POE game, much different from first. This is a once in lifetime experience. Let's enjoy it and not worry about build guides and stuff. They put a lot of work into trying to make POE 2 playable without guides, with respec system and all, it's likely nearly impossible to truly brick a build in POE 2.

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TheKnave69#5275 wrote:

I've never followed build before, an not going to start now. I understand that hyper-optimized characters may make some people happy, but I play for my own enjoyment, so organically building and experimenting with skills is part of my fun. If I fail, I fail. If I succeed, I've done it myself. Just my thought.

I am sort of in this camp.
I've been playing on and off since 2012 and it wasnt until last year that I tried a build guide. It was cool, I guess. But I grew bored of it really fast.

Due to how the game is designed, it does mean that I end up meeting an impenetrable wall with some builds, but thats OK honestly. Its OK to lose and to have the game end.