Learning to make my own build. Advice?

Hey there, I don't post often on these forums. But I am considering for fun breaking off from following build guide and just pick a skill and hone in on it on my own merit. FYI this is before the league. Has anyone tried to do this and if so what advice can you give? I use a laptop for PoB and I play on Ps5. I feel like if I do this, this may make me a better player forcing me to learn the nuances of the game better to become a better player. Any helpful advice is appreciated.

When making a build, I always have certain thresholds I like too achieve, depending on the archetype. Physical and Elemental max hit in PoB is always a nice guideline for how tanky you build will be. Effective hit pool doesn't really tell you much and can easily be inflated by certain mechanics.

I like to aim for at least 15-20k max phys hit and twice as much elemental max hit, and I see that as the goal for a successful build able to do most things beside ubers. That said, life/mana sustain is often a bit vague in PoB, so I like to add a little bit over the top and scale it down if I can when executing the build.

Knowing your DPS goal is also nice. For me, this heavily depends on what I'm building; spells, melee, ranged, DoT and so on. A DoT build is/was often misrepresented in PoB, and it also usually have better DPS uptime then other skills, therefore I'm not stressing DPS numbers in PoB that much when building DoT builds. Melee usually have the worst DPS uptime on bosses, so I like to aim for more DPS.

But the most important thing in my opinion, is to be clear to yourself on what you want the build to do. Bosser? Mapper? Sanctum runner? Heist? Or a Jack of all trades, master of none? How important is clear speed to you? How important is bossing? Is this a league starter?

Knowing the META is also important. As an example: This league, for MOST builds, will - just as the last league and the league before - heavily revolve around the Ralakesh boots and charge stacking. Why? Because it's strong as hell and will make 9/10 builds stronger.

Lastly; Don't go around checking all the boxes in PoB just to make some numbers go up, you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Check the right boxes.

I learned a lot from just watching other people showing and explaining their PoB's on Youtube.

The most important thing is to know what you want to get our of the build. Are you looking for something that can do everything? Something good for clearing? For bossing? Super tanky? Glass cannon? Scale into end game or just a league starter? Use a specific skill?

Once you figured out your goals, start reading what other content creators have made and understand why they chose what they chose. This is a really good time to learn to throw out the bad builds out there. You can then either scale up to your goal or work down to leveling. You can also level one way and once you meet a certain threshold convert to your desired build. Study what synergizes well with each other. Read through the wiki to learn how damage, conversion, defenses, etc are calculated.

I appreciate this alot guys, I just keep getting baited every league and the last time I had success was with a Frost Blades build. It was amazing but the creator seldom does stuff nowadays. So I wanted to start learning the process and form my own kind of build one day, there are so many skills I have yet to try. But this League I want to be more successful. the only way I learn mostly is by doing, so I am trying to get my hands dirty.

Something to remember is to pay attention to other aspects than just dps and defense, once you've got them sorted.

Some examples:

Budget and availability of gear. Depending what mode you are playing and a what stage of the league you are using the build, this might be relevant.

Attribute requirements and access to skill gems.

Play style, QOL, how much buttons need to be pressed, etc.

Ease of levelling, or ability to level with a different build. I've made a few build that turned out ok once I got to the level of the POB, but levelling with the build itself was extremely time consuming.

You can also try and do a quick run-through of the campaign before league to see if you think it is going to work or not. This might be difficult in some cases if there are changes that enable the build, but you should be able to get some bearings.

Also be realistic that you build might not explode out of the gates like some tested builds. There will probably be some things you encounter along the way that you haven't thought of.

Also don't forget mana/resource costs, that's a big one.

Something I see in a lot of bad builds is stretching all over the place because "that cluster is cool and so is that one." The most important thing to remember here is that "power per point" is the key to a strong, efficient build. Take this for example:

https://pobb.in/xUKrwFA8EZF5

If you are playing swords, that may seem great at first because you get all the sword wheels plus a big wheel of life. But look at how many points it cost you to get so little.

Now if you try to be more compact with your tree, notice how much more total stuff you get with the same 58 points:

https://pobb.in/OiJALmGondH3

If you remember this principle and the fact that you want as few of the tiny nodes as possible with rare exceptions (one of those being life nodes), you'll be fine.