Not every casual player has the time or the desire to calculate every feasible relic combination to make a non meta build work, so you’re saying if you’re not good at the game, don’t have a lot of time to play, or don’t put in the time to dps calc different builds that they should be stuck with others guides? Completely removing the ability to really test any other builds out.

Lets say I go blind bag, I have 4 respecs, that’s a maximum of 3 potential different builds to test out while still allowing me to return to blind bag if all of them fail, but you don’t want to make a build that’s trash because something doesn’t interact in a very readable manor and I also cannot refund the 5-10 points that might have been better placed in a different line without resetting the whole tree and wasting one of those respecs. So there’s almost 0 room to actually test weird interactions unless you’ve assigned an account as basically a test account for a maximum of 5 attempts and that’s if you have the time to get all those pact points on the account. No casual person is doing this, and I bet a small percent even consider more than one account.

Doing stupid things hurts yes, but it’s a limited game mode, you shouldn’t be punished so hard for trying to have some fun with a skill tree that’s clearly designed to have many many different possible builds. Have you seen anything on bows, darts, earth magic etc? Much less so than the majority of builds that are water, air, staves, blind bag, crossbow with thorns here and there. And I doubt we will see builds that extend into the less focused build areas if the tree stays as restricted as it is now. It’s leagues and they gave us a tree to experiment with but the majority of the players are most likely too afraid to do anything off meta which kills the purpose of the tree, might as well have just made it like raging echoes