I’ve leveled up many characters and I’ve never really thought about it too much. I generally do one into each mastery (or two into one mastery on single mastery builds) and one into a skill. I’ve done it that way since my first character and it’s always kinda worked out. But I was thinking, perhaps I’ve been doing it bad the entire time.
So is their a better way to use skill points? should I be rushing to whatever my builds key skills are and just dump all my points into those until they’re maxed?
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It depends. What I do:
- Are your key skills in reach and available for levelling?
- Then invest early.
- E.g. if you level with Devouring Swarm you should max it out early
- Are your key skills in reach but have nodes you want further on?
- Then invest more in the skill, but keep putting 1-2 points in the mastery bar to reach the nodes
- When you have all nodes unlocked, max out the useful ones first
- E.g. forcewave, Dreeg’s evil eye
- Are your key skills out of reach or gated behind specific items for usability?
- Then level with a different mastery/skill
- Or level with an item skill like (greater)fireblast, conflagration relic, etc
- Keep investing in the mastery bar and some useful secondary skills until you reach your main one
- e.g. AAR builds do this a lot
- Are your key skills available, but not the conversions you want to use later?
- Then you need to decide whether to invest in your key skills but with the wrong damage type
- Or use a different skill/item skill that has the right damage type
But respeccing skills is pretty cheap early on so you can always change your mind.
Or just do what speed builders do and use a merit and grab a bunch of notes from high level areas, put on XP gear, drink XP potion, and get a ton of levels and skip all this.
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Max your main dmg skill insofar it’s manageable with energy cost.
There is very little need or “reason” to go the mastery bar approach i found out after several years of pumping that for “comfort”(and a bit of piano lulz).
Actually killing stuff with an invested skill is more safe 
*there can be some caveat variables depending on mastery, where maxing certain support skills can grant huge comfort defensively, or even offensively, and then still be worth depending on your preferences.
Ex maxing vindictive flame can feel kinda cheesy since it gives you tons of regen while adding a smidge dmg, and regen is very comfy as stat approach in early acts. Less dmg than maxing BWC ofc, but comfy survival wise still. - meanwhile i don’t bother maxing ex Maiven until later and just low point it
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I share my personal thoughts on this as a leveler in this video , you might find useful information on some topics :
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Depends on your approach. Some players have separate levelling builds using the generally well known “easy” skills, and only swap to the desired final state at level 94/100.
I personally decide on what character I want to build in advance and always go for it from the start. Far from optimal, but I prefer keeping the character fantasy over powergaming
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Yeah one of the few times I broke from my usual style is when I made a magic missile character. turns out if you max out magic missile at like level 12 you can only cast it like 4 times before you run out of mana.
Reminds me of my D&D wizard.
Be glad this isn’t Baldur’s Gate where you could cast magic missile 2 times per day (at level 1) and the rest of the time had to use a sling for 1D4 damage.
certain skills scale easier on secondary nodes (some are entirely free like secondary effects/Torent+Soulfire etc)
