Hello, I’m Myhr, 35 years-old. My main two hobbies are P&P RPG and videogames.
To be honest, I’m not a super hardcore A-RPG player, if I had to name my favorite genre, it would be J-RPGs. 
I’ve played quite a lot of the “big names” of the A-RPG genre, mostly Diablo 2, Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, PoE, Loki, and more recently, TitanQuest and Grim Dawn, these are games that I like playing for long sessions, but I generally do one character and push it until I’m bored…which generally happens around the 200ish hour mark.
Diablo 3 was a notable exception because of the smooth gameplay, and I really liked the aesthetic of the game (independently of the fact that it’s a Diablo game, if you know what I mean). Plus, I was playing with friends, which is always good to get going. But eventually, I got fed-up of the itemization, and the fact that you got shoehorned into specific builds pretty hard. I mean, what good is it to have 20 different skills if you have only 5ish main skill combinations to work with.
This is when a friend of mine made me discovered TitanQuest, and I was really impressed by its design, mainly the dual-class system, but also the flexibility in the gear system. The setting was really cool to, all in all, great experience, but again, after pushing a character concept, I still bumped into the limitations of the system.
Why am I saying all that (apart from the fact that I can be quite talkative :D)? Well, after 370ish hours (I know, I know, nothing to be bragging about :D), I’ve finally finished AoM storyline with my very own lvl 100 Dual-wielding Elemental Battlemage. Can kill most Nemesis without trouble, but has trouble against Celestial…And this is where I just want to praise Crate for the game’s difficulty design. It’s so cool that the system allows for unorthodox builds to just…work, on the hardest difficulty, against Nemesis, with still optional harder challenges like Celestials and Gladiator Crucible.
I could go on about the dual-class and gearing system design and how much freedom it allows, but here, I just want to say that where TitanQuest began to open the possibility in terms of builds, Grim Dawn has smashed the doors wide-open. With Diablo 3 Rift design, your build is never really finished, you just push and push and push. Grim Dawn has a set number of endgame goals with different difficulty levels : ending the campain, killing Nemesis, killing Celestials, Crucible. And it’s pretty cool because you can stop where you feel comfortable and feel good about it. In other words, I feel like the difference between “meta-builds” and personal creations is both significant and not overwhelming.
So here I am, and I want to thank Crate and the awesome Grim Dawn community that helped me tremendously on my journey, with mods like GrimStash, sites like GrimTools, super useful posts about farming routes, sometimes obscure mechanics like resist reducing and dots, thank you to all of you. I’m looking forward to make another wonky build and push it to Ultimate (next : 2handed-ranged Fire Strike Defiler!)
Glad to hear we’ve helped you on your quest for wonky builds. Sometimes they’re the most fun of all.