I’ve been at max level for quite some time and maxxed WONY pretty quickly. I only play solo and coop with one regular coop partner. For me, at this point, developing new builds is the only draw to keep me in the game, everything else feels very BTDT.
I had a very nice crit red build that I enjoyed a lot, and there’s a new armor set that seems to work well with that. I tried a Negotiator’s Dilemma build that was interesting but didn’t work as well for me as others have found it to be.
I then developed a Hard Wired skill build, with a specific set of talents and gear, with a sniper turret and cluster seekers. Basically I could throw out clusters that did a LOT of damage, immediately put up the sniper turret which also did huge damage, and as soon as I put up the sniper turret it refreshed my clusters and I could immediately toss those again. A skill kill also had a 25% chance of refreshing the other skill. I could go through missions at Challenging solo with that build and just blow through the ones I was really familiar with. I played the world at Challenging and CPs at Heroic. (I could play the world at Heroic but for me it became a bit tedious in that I couldn’t go from point to point without non stop bad guys in the way.)
I’m now playing a HW build, full Tier 6 (using the technician specialist for the 6th tier) using the assault turret and assault drone, and it is pretty crazy in terms of damage dealt.
There’s a new build I want to try now, mentioned up thread, Firestarter with the new Eclipse Protocol gear. Looking at Youtube videos for optimized builds. I do miss the power of a red build, but for solo and coop these skill builds are pretty awesome. My coop partner and I replayed Roosevelt Island at Challenging recently. The first time we played that mission, at Hard, we were just overwhelmed. We went over the wall over and over and over and would get slaughtered, overrun, it seemed freaking impossible. We’d try new strategies every time on the final battle, but we still felt like the last scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid every time we jumped over the wall. This time, we had it at challenging, used the assault drone and assault turret, full HW skill builds, using the Bakers Dozen and the Bullet King LMG (which is crazy powerful - no need to ever reload, just unload it as if you were a non-stop assault turret of your own) and when we finished it we said “is that really it? Is it really over?”
Nothingbutskillz has some good builds on Youtube, he describes them well, doesn’t claim to be the know all of D2, and in spite of his name has a variety of builds.