Go with whats fun. I find its good to have a general idea on what to put points into, but as you get gear and reach harder content you will adapt and change your points and constellations to suit your needs.
Some guides offer step by step guides on what to invest and when to change. These guides also have end gear that is assumed you will have.
Personally I find that the gear you find ALWAYS seems to be meant for another class. Once I get a few good pieces for a particular class I aim to build around that. For example my first toon was a Blademaster (mistake very gear dependant) then a dual wield pistol sorcerer. I eventually accumulated a lot of BiS gear for a summoner and now he’s my farming char.
101’s you want to keep in mind:
In ultimate resists are KING. Was recently farming some mats and ran into a nemesis and I just couldn’t kill him. I used a potion to put my self at resit cap and had no issue (16% can make all the world of a difference).
Focus on getting a mix of defensive/offensive constellations (maybe even more so on defensive). Its easy enough to get the offence you need from gear. As you get BiS you have more freedom
try to reach 2500+ OA and 2000+ DA. I believe these are some basic caps that allow crits and not getting critically hit with out causing balancing constraints.
Most masteries have 1 point wonders and some abilities aren’t worth having more points past their max from plus skills (diminishing returns… its up to you if you want to justify the extra points for smaller gains), so you can reallocate some of these into other abilities or passives.
You can’t respec points once you spent them into masteries or character attribute points. As mentioned mainly going into physical with a few into spi/cunning for gear requirements you can’t go wrong. Once you have a better idea of a class and BiS gear you can then then focus more on other attribute points. You “generally” want to max one mastery and have 32-50 points into a second mastery (for abilites and stat points). Going pure one mastery is only possible as a soldier atm, but they are looking to nerfing that class within the week.
Item type filter is your friend (its beside your health bar to the left).
Normal is for funz, elite is for farming (for ultimate) and more serious build focus. Ultimate requires a lot of fine tuning and gear.
As other mentioned this is all about trying new builds once you establish a character and character development has meaning here compared to D3. The journey is getting your character to 85 while D3 its about climbing grifts (end game).
As far as less gear dependency try to aim for a caster DoT build or possibly a dual wield melee/ranged pyromancer.
This is just 2 cents from a noob that has barely played compared to a lot of folks here… Hope it helps 