I play rogue and I think there’s like a decent amount of viable builds. Im running barrage with poison and ice that’s a lot of fun. I started with pen shot/shadow which was also cool. Then of course there’s the twisting blades rogue.

You might consider sorc? You can try out different elements or combinations of them, though I’m not sure how many of them are viable.

For season 1 I’m gonna play necro for the minions. Maybe I’ll start with bone spear/blood since ive heard bone spear is very strong and blood skills are satisfying to use.

Druid has decent variety, but it depends on what sort of comparisons you are making. For pushing the very highest of NM-dungeons there is going to be less variety, in all classes.

Druid has the most viable builds.

I have the same issue with my Sorc. All of the viable builds are the same with one or two details changed

I am current playing HotA-barb with no shouts at all. Is it optimal? I don’t know, most likely not. Works for me though.

I actively avoid following guides etc, because it’s to easy to optimize the fun out of the game. Most likely there will always be the „best“ build, even if only mathematically. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

“Shout builds” aren’t a thing, since all shouts are support skills. There isn’t anything like the Singer/War Cry Barbarian from D2.

You’re right that the skill system in D4 tends to homogenize builds due to powerful cooldown skills though. Sorc has the same exact issue, where you keep the same 4 cooldown defensive skills in every build.

The class with the most skill diversity overall is Rogue I think, although there are still several skills with next to no use at the moment. Rogue at least has lots of options for Core skill/spender, and a variety of play styles (melee, ranged, traps).

I've played around with rogue and sorc so far. The two do feel different to one another, but within them - feels like you have "defensive melee sorc" and "squishy sorc" and both play almost identically. Rogue is either melee zip zap or mid range zip zap. Both play heavily around maintaining cc.

It feels like there's a whole skill slot missing. Or some skills/passives need a bigger buff to allow for more utility options. Basic skills being kinda meaningless, you can either have one to press to feel like you are doing something or you run around for 2 seconds not pressing anything if you take an actual skill instead.
Like sure, you can take combo points and auto attack three times... Which feels bad because the skill itself does basically nothing.

This is my hesitation with barb too. HotA is solid, leapquake is fun, and Fatal Blow is satisfying, but upheaval looks dumb and I don't like ww or bleeds.

Compared to the sheet build variety of druid, that's not a lot of variety, though to be fair a lot of the high performing builds rely on 2+ uniques (tempest, crone, waxing gibbous, vasily's) to really function.