doesnt everyone take branded burst already tho?
i feel like there just isnt that much room in this game for different things, the game doesnt really have the scope or the mechanical design to support widely varying characters. it fails at the vast majority of opportunities to provide meaningful different approaches to building. no classes, no reason to specialise in a given damage type like toxic or lightning, no reason to specialise in damage scaling between say crit, non crit, dot etc. dot builds are crit because crit scales their dots, crit builds are dot because they get damage per ailment stack, ailment stacking pushes into hitting with as many different damage types as possible to inflict the maximum amount of simultaneous ailment stacks. you get so much generic % increased damage from attribute points that it makes absolutely no sense to take any of the % damage from the tree that comes in more specialised forms like material, projectile, spell etc.
if you want to make a game where people can customise their characters, make individual choices and have a reason to go and build different characters around different mechanics that inspire them then you need to take every opportunity to provide mutually exclusive options that take them down different paths. you have different damage types, fire, frost, aether, so you make it rewarding to specialise in 1 or 2 and this then focuses them into specific skills and specific passives and you give them options on how to apply that damage through direct hits, crit hits, dots etc that will further influence which skills make sense with that method...
wolcen essentially does none of that, the scope for having very different builds with very different passives is so minimal. youd look at that passive tree and think yo, ok these guys have played a LOT of path of exile, you look at the skill runes and rifts and think ok, these guys obviously know their D3. but then you look at the game mechanics and with all respect you have to question if theyve played much in the way of arpgs at all.