Newbie question: Help with 2-player party build

Hi folks,
New here and somewhat overwhelmed. My wife and I are looking at trying out PoE, and we'll be playing an exclusively 2-player party. Is there anything we need to make sure to do so our builds complement each other? For example, can the game be played without a tank? Should we avoid using the same primary attributes? Does one of us need to be a healing expert, or ranged expert?
Any advice would be welcome.

Cheers,
Vandervecken

The tank/dps/support paradigm doesn't really hold in PoE because it's very much designed so that you can do everything solo. There are pure support builds (although they are not worth using if you only have two people), but other than that pretty much every build does plenty of damage, can heal themselves very substantially and has to put at least a little bit of investment into defense.

What would definitely benefit you is to have a fairly tanky short-range build and a squishier, high-DPS long-ranged build. Simply having someone else around to attract monster aggro is a ridiculous boon to any glass cannon ranged build. As to what kind of builds you go for within that, there are loads of possibilities. You could have the tanky character be pretty much any flavour of melee build, or a caster if you preferred. Likewise, the other build could use bows, wand attacks, spells, or even melee weapons in a couple of funky ways. Any preferences?

You totally don't have to follow that suggestion either. Any two normal builds will work just fine, there just won't be as much synergy.

Thanks for the help. We've settled on a Duellist (me) and a Witch (wife). She's a fan of glass cannon builds, while I'm happy being up close and personal.
I went looking at the Duellist build section. Seems like a lot of this is based around my choice of active skill.
Any guidance as to what kind of Duellist/Witch builds might be fun? We're coming from a background in Diablo 2 (Barbarian/Sorceress) so that basic paradigm (short range aggro, long range glass cannon) is very familiar to us.

Cyclone is whirlwind. :/
Frenzy is pretty similar between the games as well.
Leap slam I think was in D2.

Arc is chain lightning.
You can pseudo make frozen orb out of ball lightning.
Summoners are more complicated in POE I feel.
Fire storm is kind of like meteor. (stretching a little)

Basically, most of the D2 play styles are here in POE. You just need to try out some skills to see what you like. With POE you can change skills anytime you want but it is probably best to experiment early because of the passive tree.

Yeah, I would probably go for some flavour of Cyclone as a first Duelist build. It's fun, straightforward, relatively flexible, and powerful however you build it. You could also look at Reave, Ground Slam, Ice Crash or Sweep.

Assuming you want a caster for the Witch build, and something that can really pump out the damage at long range, I'd look into Bladefall, Ball Lightning or Firestorm. Arc and Arctic Breath would also be reasonable, but the former is a little lower on damage and the latter can be a little finicky to use. Probably the ideal build for this sort of role would be a Cast on Crit Barrage spec, but that is complicated and pretty heavy on the gear requirements, so I'd avoid it for now. Something for your wife to keep in mind for the future though, Cast on Crit builds are some of the coolest glass cannons in the game.

Scratch that.
Poor idea.

You should plan builds that complement each other. If one of you is really good at killing weak packs quickly, the other should focus on dealing with tanky mobs and bosses.
Also, if one of the builds is so fragile that it absolutely needs to kill really fast to survive, the other is not supposed be a slow tanky guy - unless he can provide a massive defensive benefit somehow.
Also, your supportive skills (auras, curses etc.) should be chosen so that both characters benefit from them.

If one of your builds going through the area to the right of Scion start consider getting Conduit and using some charge generation with that character(frenzy, PCoC, whatever). Saw a topic some time ago about party of 2 - one was generator and the other used self-cast discharge. The author sounded pretty happy about results, and gear reqs were fairly low iirc.

Easy mode : deal the same type of damage, physical/chaos or elemental for the party. This way you can use the same curse and aura, and one can go dual curse for the team.

An example is : Melee/ice crash/warlord'smark blasphemy/Hatred, with a ranged/dual totem summon raging spirit/haste... It's not all physical but there is still a strong synergy. Another example : The same melee but with a glacial cascade or arctic breath ranged... Not all cold but strong synergy just cause of chill mechanics...

And going to the wiki to understand the mechanics.

Many thanks folks!