Right now, I can tell you....no one knows.

Everyone right now is expirementing. The devs were smart and made all the main attributes add to your attack; which is great. I would recommend you use Agility and Toughness, but someone else might disagree with that.
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Skills are mostly based on your playstyle and what you find fun. Since you can always respect your skills, your shouldn't be too worried.
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In SC (softcore) It's not overly important that you be optimal. When if they drop a HC mode, it'll be more important to pick specifics, and we'll know more about the game by then.

Let me help u tommorow with a few guides in passive and active along with some gear tips closed game for today 😀

im using a pistol and a shield atm, its really just down to preference, you can do 2 pistols or a bow, all 3 are valid choices.

you can use any skills the game will let you use with those weapons, again theres no real right or wrong about it. a pistol lets you use all the ranged stuff that says it works with pistols and the shield will let you use most of the stuff tagged as melee. technically having a pistol and shield makes you a hybrid of ranged and melee so feel free to try out any of those skills really, if it works it works.

regarding attributes and gear, that depends how you want to deal damage basically. if you are going for a build that does a lot of crit you probably want a lot of the ferocity attribute to buff your crit chance, and on gear you probably want to get a fair bit of critical hit chance score and ferocity. if you want to deal damage over time you want to spec a lot of wisdom and look for ailment chance score on your gear. agility gives you attack speed so if you just want to attack really fast then i guess go for agility and get attack speed on gear.

i think most things are probably a valid way of working but some skills will favour one way over another. for example some skills are very cooldown based or resource hungry, so scaling attack speed isnt really a good way to go with them. for those u might spec into crit and cooldown reduction. I guess if youre looking for a way to 'do it right' just pick a way u think will work with the skills you like and try to spec your attributes, your passive tree and your gear stats towards the same goal.
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personally im using a pistol and a shield, ive gone for crit, im using the turrets which dont seem to scale with your attack speed, the wailing arrows thing thats on a cooldown and the rail gun which again is not really a speedy spam thing. so ive gone just for crit, not going for attack speed, ive got a shield so ive gone for block chance + block efficiency and obviously i need life to stay alive so ive gone for life stuff too. ive specced some toughness and an awful lot of ferocity on my attributes, probably like 4 ferocity for every 1 toughness, im trying to get as much life and critical hit chance as possible on gear and my tree is mostly going for crit, life and block stuff, as well as a few nodes that help sustain fury so i can keep attacking a lot with my spenders. as a lower priority im trying to get resists to reduce incoming damage a bit more and cooldown in order to be able to drop turrets and to the wailing arrows thing more often.

i have another pistol and shield build at a slightly lower level tho and that one is doing damage over time with no crit at all, and thats just as valid a way of doing things, it uses slightly different skills though.

I am hard stuck on Edric mate, Still getting boned at lvl 24 and it's almost impossible to grind primordial affin and gold to respec and I can't get any good item drops cause the level caps out on most items at 17-19 in this area. Should I just re-roll? am I screwed? The hell do I do now, got any good tips? :D

I would also appreciate some tips for good actives and passives, feel free to share in the thread :)

@kasen currently Ferocity is King Crit is everything no suprise here tho since its in most RPGs that have stat allocation OR a straight up way to scale it+ Crit is so easy to come by by the lvl 20-25 ull have above or near 50% crit WHich is INSANE in terms of weapon choice Its up to you What skills do u wanna end up using Some if not most skills are limited to a certain weapon or lets say type is probaly the better wording anyhow if u like Bow use a bow if like a pistol/cata so u can use Bulwark or aether jump u can do that aswell U cant go wrong in all honesty aslong as u plan out what u wanna do and what u wanna use respeccing is rather izi in this game so Experiment find out what u like and if u think u found a suitable skill that u enjoy to the fullest and u feel like ur stuck or dont wanna progress anymore due u feeling behind starting over isnt hard either :P

ok, if u need to change stuff because u think u went wrong and you really cant farm the means to do it you got 2 choices.

1. reroll
2. cheat a free respec

cause the game is new, various passives arnt worded well, theres little info on what passives even work properly and what ones are bugged, i think the way its set up where its super hard to respec at low levels is a bad design... and on and on...

i cheated respecs. only works in offline mode. by the time ur in endgame u can get the orbs to respec quite easily, when ur say level 1 if u put in 1 point being able to take that point out is almost impossible because you keep levelling up and the cost goes up quicker than u can find skills to vendor for the infinity points... i think they will rebalance this aspect of the game, if not theyre crazy imo.

ziggyD did a vid where he shows how to access ur offline saves so you can edit in stuff to get around a lot of the bugs atm, eg quest bugs, you specced some passives and it turns out theyre broken and dont work, blah blah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l3DP7Qpxzc

now what i would say is if ur the sort of person who might ruin the game for themselves by just going crazy with this sort of thing maybe its best not to break that ice. if ur the sort of person whos just gonna use it to try out a couple of respecs that will let you get on with playing the game properly and having fun then do it, edit ur file, give urself enough gold and infinity to respec what uve done and move on.
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with regards to passives, I can tell you what I have specced at lvl52 with a pistol and shield build and its worked, i got through the game without much bother. Ill name the big nodes ive taken, ill try and screenshot my tree too...

soldier: wild card (red) 1st ring
soldier: second wind (red) 1st ring
praetorian: kingless aegis (red) 2nd ring
time weaver: which time cannot tell (purple) 3rd ring
warlock: duty to exterminate (purple) 2nd ring
exorcist: branded burst (green) 3rd ring
child of fury: furious appetite (red) 3rd ring
warmonger: manic slaughter (red) 2nd ring

https://i.imgur.com/mqTkuRv.jpg

i dunno if between the screen shot and me telling u which are the big nodes i took u will be able to rotate ur tree in the same way and be able to tell what exactly i took, hopefully so, hopefully u got 2 monitors.

ok so with the way the tree rotates, i didnt have it in the position ive got it atm early on, you can turn that outer ring so that you can take the thing u want to get first right away, and then as you go around the outer edge of the second ring more you can rotate the third ring around to get easier access to everything you want without breaking the chains of nodes if that makes sense?

"child of fury: furious appetite" is really good, I think i rotated my outer ring so that i could spec that right away at the start. I didnt bother with second wind or the aegis block node until a lot later on, just went right for the crit node and furious appetite cause that makes you regenerate rage rather than willpower. then i went for duty to exterminate for the extra fury and got the branded burst node which is pretty good survivability.

I just threw all my attributes into fury, got crit chance and added flat damage to attacks everywhere i could and then obviously as much life on gear as possible too.

im using the little sentry turret things, wailing arrows and rail gun. my turrets turn to target monsters, i think that is the most important rune to take on those. wailing arrows just deals crazy damage, it does its thing. the rail gun i took the node that procs stasis on hit and the node where it returns fury if you fire it without charging it up. thats how i use it, i dont rly charge it, i just fire it off like a shotgun and it does good damage + gives everything it hits stasis, then the "time weaver: which time cannot tell" passive tree node makes enemies inflicted by stasis take the damage u hit them with a second time (it seems to not count the extra crit damage mind u, but still works wonders).

So the way it plays, i throw down my turrets, hit everything with casual blasts of the rail gun and then hammer single targets with the wailing arrows when its off cooldown.

I had around 40% crit chance fairly early on, atm i waver between 50% and 60% depending on gear/levels.

the turrets are really good cause u can put em down and just run around if things get a bit mad, stop to fire off a wailing arrows hail then keep moving again. that boss ur stuck on has a shield so i think u put down turrets and then circle him so he turns his back to them where hes not shielded, then just keep smacking him with wailing arrows. i think i pretty much obliterated him.

i didnt get the block stuff until i got into endgame. im at lvl52 on that character and im doing lvl52 veteran expeditions, its pretty easy nothing rly gets in my way, will have to see how it scales as we get deeper into endgame.
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ailments are definitely an alternative to crit, i had an ailment dagger build but ended up switching to pistol cause its just a lot easier to have your generator be able to hit from range when u need it and the pistol could use all the same skills. pohx did a video on how to do an ailment pistol build that i saw the other day, he kind of did it slightly differently but it seemed good...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQID1WMzNEo

personally im still using the turrets on mine cause i just love the turrets, throw em down and let them mop up all the trash mobs. but i definitely learned a few things and changed a few passives when i saw his vid and i started to understand better how to scale ailment damage over time. I was a bit more squishy levelling up but it absolutely melted stuff.

Thanks all for the amazing feedback. I have just been reading over everything, now I need to apply some of the things I have learned to my character. Really appreciate the help :D