2-h shaman and soldier is called Warden I think? Maybe, can't remember. Anyway, that's my first and main build, and I can say that it will definitely take you through the whole game pretty easily. I didn't focus on lightning, although for the life of me I can't remember what I did focus on... I know I used the shaman version of cadence, and no pets, and a ton of my damage was from the constellation skills.
One thing to keep in mind for those of you just sort of winging it and not following a guide, is that you can quickly overwhelm yourself with too many skills. Both in number of buttons to actually press and watering down their effectiveness. Some of my best builds only had 3-4 active skills, and a fuckload of passives and procs. Speaking of procs, you'll see skills that say stuff like "activates off primary attack with 12% chance." You can have a bunch of those, but they are additive, so you don't want to go over 100% proc chance or you are losing something. That's where you might not level a particular skill all the way to soft/hard cap, because anything over 100% total is wasted. Sure, it might not do as much damage as putting more points into it, but everything I've read is pretty hardline about over 100% being a waste of points.
I'm actually sort of jealous of you guys that get to experience this game from the beginning. This is one of my favorite games of all time, but I've played it so much that it doesn't spark much joy anymore.