Yeah, I was in a similar boat. A friend was GMing a PF1 game once and I asked: "Yes, I could, but when have I ever built a character that breaks the game?" lightbulb moment - "All I want is to be reasonably effective, and build a character with a gameplay loop that's not boring when I'm a player. Which is why all of my characters are built around doing something other than direct damage."
After I’d been playing D&D a decade or so, and having tried games like Traveller & Champions, I had a mental shift in how I played.
Instead of being driven by Monte Haulism, I started trying my damnednest to fully realize my characters within the ruleset used. I wanted them to be the most “themselves” I could make them. Even if my character was combat focused, I was maximizing the character the way that character would.
For example, I had a character who was a Sorcerer descended from blue dragons, with the appropriate Draconic heritage feats. He was
obsessed with his ancestry. All of his combat spells were electrically themed. After discussions with the DM, even his spells with a different elemental types became electrical, even though he didn’t have the Elemental Substitution feat. Instead, he’d learned substituted versions of them from jump. Additionally, his obsession meant he’d only be learning electrical versions of elemental attack spells going forward.
The aforementioned heritage feats included Draconic Breath- Lightning. Very handy for a beefy arcane spellcaster who also wore scale mail, despite not being proficient in it (at first), so fully subject to ASF.*
This meant that he was loaded for bear against anything vulnerable to electrical attacks. It also meant he was essentially useless against enemies that shrugged off such attacks.
* he ALSO started off using a maul (without proficiency) because of his job as a brothel bouncer.
