idbeholdME: Just following someone else's build seems pointless to me. At that point, you are just letting someone else play the game for you.
I will read up on mechanics, how stuff works/interacts or how character progression works in the said game, but I will always play my own way/ theorycraft my own builds.
I have probably thousands of hours on Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, Diablo and Sacred combined and I have not once just found a guide and said "just gonna do this"
The only thing I'm conflicted on are some RPG games, especially those that don't have a respec option. Take Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale for example. There are a ton of weapon specilizations, but you have no idea how supported that weapon type is. An extreme example:
You might end up going flails and only find out after 30 hours that 80% of the weapons are swords and axes and there are barely any flails at all.
Sometimes a new player is frustrated as they find the game extremely hard due to bad builds and that is exactly why they look up how to make the game easier by picking a better build without getting spoilers.
Of course, they run into a common problem of games with add-ons that people posts builds designed for the high-level expansion at level 25 where actually playing that from level 1 will make the game harder from levels 3-20 as you are taking borderline useless stuff with your end-game build in mind.
Other times you are looking at other people's builds to see how to use a given feature since often by itself it is weak, but you need other things to synergize with it.
On the subject of picking bad builds out of the gate due to not metagaming, Temple of Elemental Evil is even worse with so many skills and you have no clue which ones are useful. Buck Rogers "Countdown to Doomsday" was another really bad example as three of the skills offered were completely useless since they were never used in the game and thus you wasted the points.
Because of those examples, I wind up with choice paralysis and with games like that where you have a myriad of skills but can only pick half of them (at best) I'll look at other people's builds to see which ones are "must haves" that will make the game 10 times harder if not impossible if you don't have them, and which ones only have a few situational uses making them nearly useless in favor of a "must have".
Buck Rogers is the only one I know with genuinely useless skills (they were used in the sequel).
Also there is the weapon proficiency example like in Baldur's Gate. In Badur's Gate II the game kinda lies to you, in warning you that Katanas are rare. That is somewhat true in that there are only 3 enchanted katanas (4 if you count Yoshimo's) (A generic +1, a generic +2, and Celestial Fury) but you can find Celestial Fury, one of the best weapons in the game quite early and easily if you follow Hendak's hints and do the slaver quest.
Dragon Wars was another early example that caused this, and also the first one I played with this issue. Yes, I know Wasteland technically came first, but I didn't get Wasteland until after I got Dragon Wars. In that one there were no useless skills, but there were some skills you absolutely had to have that didn't seem that important like Bureaucracy, and others that sounded useful but were far more situational than the descriptions implied. Fortunately the starting party had all the "must haves" chosen. Also you could make it through the game without Bureaucracy, it just made it 10 times harder. About the only "must have" skills were obvious, "Bandage" and the magic skills where the game manual recommends you have four characters specialize in the four different branches.
Games like Dragon Wars and Wasteland were my intro to this phenomenon and when I got access to dial-up a decade later did make me seek out builds because of getting burned from bad choices. The problem was in the era of Dragon Wars the internet as we know it did not exist. For reference, I don't have Dragon Wars in my GoG library, I have the Apple IIGS version on 3.5" disks.
On the other hand, I didn't feel the need to seek out builds for Icewind Dale II because it was generally possible for the entire party to invest in all the skills spread out over all six of the characters. Less so for the feats, but they didn't seem like something that you would need to get past a certain area. I didn't need to look up builds for the earlier Infinity Engine games, even if I did screw up with Planescape Torment by not maxing out my wisdom and intelligence but instead making a balance with high strength (because I'm a packrat and STR increases my carrying capacity). In general, if I can cover all the skills I don't look for builds, but if I have to make blind choices I'll look for builds so I don't get burned taking useless skills and making things 10 times harder because I neglected a vital skill that didn't seem important.
