Has a single new strong build been invented this update?

Besides Dark Pact, Charged Dash handles high tier content just fine too. All in all, it's only the most fancy-looking one (Storm Burst) of the three new skills that didn't quite cut it (it's still decent, though). And some other skills got a new lease of life, such as Glacial Cascade mines. And then some of the new support gems created their own builds, such as Immolate.

And consider that there's actually builds that make use of Kikazaru now...

Also, builds don't arise only from changes, or additions, to active skill gems. Some also come from changes to the mechanics, so that they may look the same as before from the outside i.e. to other players, but work in new ways internally i.e. visible only to the player themselves. An example of this is the changes to Mind Over Matter. Basically, when discussing build variety, it's important to remember that there's actually several builds for each skill in the game and so changes to the mechanics enable/disable many new iterations across PoE's many skills. Ditto for changes to build-enabling uniques.

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Deadpeng wrote:

Please restrict discussion to builds that can free flow tier 14+ within a reasonable budget.

My revamped 3.0 ES-CI-ZO-GR flametank, that takes advantage of several opportunities new to 3.0 (both new game mechanics and changed uniques) and required a complete rework of the build, probably qualifies. As tank builds go, it is strong. Very strong.

It builds high maxES and good damage for a tank build through a focus on STR, while getting better ES recovery/s than you'd get in 2.6 where you had considerably higher maxES. And it chews through T14-T16 maps easily enough.

Honesty compels me to admit that it might not qualify for the "reasonable budget" if it had mainstream appeal since the affixes it looks for on rare items are rather specific, ideally having high ES from prefixes and STR+INT+RES suffixes on each item, with resistances offloaded to ES+STR+RES jewels.

The reason the rares are fairly cheap now is most likely that there are few people playing builds that prioritize the same affix combinations. E.g. while all ES builds like INT on items, most would prefer two resistances as suffixes together with the INT rather than STR and one resistance.

If STR based ES builds caught on in general rather than as now being curiosities, which might happen if somebody with a high profile were to use the same principles I do for a non-tank build with higher damage, I'd expect the price for such rares to skyrocket.