I've actually spent a lot of effort learning how to campaign and early mono. Currently, when using a 'leveling build' you can get into monos around level 34 in ~2 1/2 hours with a little bit of practice. That means you have 2-3 skills that are relevant to your 'leveling build' and your character is functionally capable of killing level 58 enemies in the first monolith - do that for ~1 hour and you'll be level 50. From there, you have 2 skills open to prep to transition into your 'real build' and climb your way through monos. Not only is this faster and stronger and all those other things, I also find that doing your 'real skill' from the earliest possible level isn't even really fulfilling, it often feels bad and plays COMPLETELY differently than it will when you have 5 skills with ~18 levels into them. It's just so much simpler, easier, and legitimately more fun to blast your way to 50-60, MAYBE swap to your desired build then (or even hold off longer if you can) and once you're at a high enough level you can flounder around for a few hours and figure out some of the weirder stuff you're thinking about trying. Leveling builds I Used (dread mentioned some of these): Glaicer Mage, Hammer/Javelin Sentinel, Totem Primalist, Bleed > Shadow Dagger Rogue, Golem/Mage/Zombie Necro, Wandering Spirits/DoT Warlock/Lich These are all builds that just work on 0 gear and CAN scale into endgame, but more-so, you can run them half-built while you prepare to swap to stuff that looks more fun. GL~

Tip: run a mono that rewards XP books, finish it, but don't pick up the books. Respec what you want, pick up the books, boom. Hope this makes switching skills easier!

anywhere from a week before patch (very unlikely) to about 2 days before patch

Some for sure, but not all. A lot of skills don't care what your defense layers are. Even the ones that do generate ward, you could still use it as another defense layer with your life build.

My lock gameplay is pretty tough on my pc

I play on low settings because I like fps over cool looking graphics

@@Dr3adful I need to check that because now game is to bright to me, even on low brightness - some skill are bright as fc. In sam maps it is ok and then on another one (where winter is ) it is so bright still. I hope devs will do something with it as it'a a lot post on games forumand redit I remember in beta all was fine and then when they add new lighting in 1.0 all go south