I make my own as I level up, and then I see how it goes at max.
If I feel like I’m lacking oomph once I’m 70 and trying to do stuff, I’ll try pasted builds from elsewhere.
Mileage varies.
I’m a casual player so I just pick my own talents since I don’t have to worry about M+ or hardcore raiding. I just want to play void priest with a Lovecraftian tentacle-and-insanity vibe.
I start with the default build and then tinker around the edges to suit how I want to roll.
I build my own.
But then I’m a “filthy open world casual” so I just grab whatever talents are best suited for that kind of play, and… I just grab whatever fillers I need that might actually have an effect on me and skip the crap I don’t care about/would be useless for me.
I usually tend to favor self-sustainability and solo survivability over raw DPS when possible, and/or stuff like stuns, or haste is usually a big one. I usually avoid extra buttons I feel are needless that do the same thing as buttons I already have to avoid button bloat, I usually avoid any grouping-centric talents (as I rarely group up), etc. I normally go for passives over big cooldown abilities when I get the choice, as well.
I build my own but may use wowhead or other players as a guide.
I’d rather understand what my talents are doing rather than copy pasta and not play a spec correctly because talent 6 means I should use ability 3 more often than usual.
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Make my own. The only copying I do is from alts on the opposite faction just to reduce my own confusion when swapping from one to the other.
I do neither but given the results of randomly picking talents I am going to have to copy on some of my characters.
Copy from wow/icey, use it for a week or so and then change it to suit my imperfect playstyle, I don’t perform like a top 1%, so I might as well make the talents suit me.
I use baseline builds and make minor tweaks here and there to suit my playstyle (e.g. Druids without curse removal or Paladins without Cleanse rub me the wrong way).
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I usually start by building a toon myself, going with what I think is nice.
Eventually, I have to admit that I made some poor choices and refer to an outside source in order to get an actual working build together.
Exibit A: My mish-mash of talents after the patch…
I never look at guides. I prefer making my builds based around how I like playing.
Having too many things to push annoys me so I tend to go for passives that make my favorite abilities better.
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I usually copy a build then change it to best suit my needs. Usually wowhead or icy veins builds are versatile enough to change without destroying the build.
Depends on what I am doing with my character.
If I build, i usually build for world survivability so I can solo almost anything.
If I ever plan to go into group content, I copy whatever works best so I dont screw the group as bad because of low dps
That’s what I do too.
On my own. Always. I don’t care what’s the “best”. I build what feels comfortable/smooth to play.
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I make my own builds. I have my own playstyle and for each class that I play I expect them to play a certain way.
Even for stats priority I choose myself what feels good, as long as you are consistant and you choose stats and talents that are aligned you will have fun and be good enough for the content.
Remember people clear raids with sub-obtimal choices and lower ilvl all the time. I highly doubt that my choices are reducing my DPS by 50%.
Some of the builds have too many active buttons, what is the point? I can’t have a rotation with 9 active button on a priority list… I hate having things I only press once every 28 seconds and it was available to press all this time.
I try to stick to 4-5 active button in a rotation and 2-4 offensive cooldowns, between 45sec and 3minutes each.
I still look at guides if I find myself being really an outlier to understand what I might be doing wrong sometimes a simple talent switch will fix it.
What I’ve learned is that copying a meta spec is sometime the worst performance choice than just playing what I’m familiar with the way I like to play and makes sense to me.
Edit : To add the most important > Patch notes will always make a build better stronger or weaker any time with no warning. I play the same style no matter what.
I have been playing feral too long. Also true with guardian spec. I made my own and then looked at the meta ones. I wasnt too far off. I will still play the one I prefer, mine. Have been doing the same since vanilla on this character.
Frost mage, this has been my main alt since vanilla, made my own. A vastly different one from the meta one, but this is an alt, not my main. My build lets me chain pull mobs much easier.
Most other classes and specs, I have been looking at meta builds to get an idea on how they work. Some still make no sense to me, but I havent played the class in 3 expansions since the last few have been so alt unfriendly.
I prefer my own funcentric builds to suit my modest needs.
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On my main I copy top players, on alts I use the starter build or do my own.
Honestly I don’t like this talent tree I prefer the old simple talents.
I just wing it and make my own, a lot of times they end up being fairly similar to whats up on icy-veins anyway because there’s pretty obvious routes that seem the most optimal. Going through the whole skill tree is fun to me since it lets me learn the entire spec I may otherwise not have much experience with much better than it was before where we had tons of skills dumped on us at once.
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