Are Counter-Intuitive Build types viable/possible? Eg: Marauder-Necromancer

Disclaimer: I am a new player.

Hopefully I'm putting this in the right place as I've been falling short of that recently (Sorry about that Mods). Now I'm still new and DO NOT plan on doing anything like this anytime soon. I have to play the game and know it as best I can before I ever tried anything like this. But I thought I'd ask nonetheless just so I have something to think about.

Okay, so I "know" that at one point or another PoE was/is known for it's flexibility with builds. I also know that each class has it's Ascendancy's and that picking the class that fits the Ascendancy you want is the most straightforward and efficient method to creating a build. Now my question is, are builds like A Marauder Necromancer (just an example) or things like that where you mix and match build types and go against the grain as it were, are they at all viable? Like I'm sure you could pull it off just by having the gems, but without the passives you're not going to get very far. But can builds like this be done and still be decent?

Looking through the various forums I see some people saying that the introduction of Ascendancy's took a lot of PoE's flexibility away but I don't know if there's any truth to that. But anyway, I just wanted to know if "counter-intuitive" builds are doable or not.

Yes and no, The easiest way to think of it is if the Ascendancy is defensive you can probably play anything as it, if its specialized offensive then you probably can't.

So for example a friend of mine has played a Thiccro the last couple of leagues (Jugg Necromancer), this is possible because Jugg provides so much defensive utility you can just fill in the relevant necro nodes afterwards.

Meanwhile a Zerker Necro would offer nearly nothing, none of your nodes provide any benefit to minions nor to yourself because you aren't attacking. The best you could justify this one for is very high movement speed I guess.

Ascendancies didn't really take much flexibility away aside from when they put specific buffs on a tree that pertain to one specific skill and they've started to pedal back on that in recent leagues. Even then it was usually for one specific build rather than an Archetype.

But yeah some of us deliberately play counter intuitive builds, being a hipster in PoE is alot of fun.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Yes and no, The easiest way to think of it is if the Ascendancy is defensive you can probably play anything as it, if its specialized offensive then you probably can't.

So for example a friend of mine has played a Thiccro the last couple of leagues (Jugg Necromancer), this is possible because Jugg provides so much defensive utility you can just fill in the relevant necro nodes afterwards.

Meanwhile a Zerker Necro would offer nearly nothing, none of your nodes provide any benefit to minions nor to yourself because you aren't attacking. The best you could justify this one for is very high movement speed I guess.

Ascendancies didn't really take much flexibility away aside from when they put specific buffs on a tree that pertain to one specific skill and they've started to pedal back on that in recent leagues. Even then it was usually for one specific build rather than an Archetype.

But yeah some of us deliberately play counter intuitive builds, being a hipster in PoE is alot of fun.

Ah okay that makes sense. I'll look over the passive tree again and look for defensive Ascendancy's to get some ideas for future builds.

Quick question about the Thiccro. How do they play? Do the minions become their primary source of offense?