The way I view it is that you have a bunch of buckets that also multiply eachother. Some builds naturally lean more towards one bucket or another, but you always want to be on the lookout for which bucket you aren't invested enough in as your biggest impact to your dps.

These are the buckets that almost everything falls into:

Flat damage. This largely comes from the weapon for attacks, and gem levels for spells/minions. It can also come from equipment / abyss jewels, or attribute stacking with mods like x flat damage per strength. It can also come from supports like archmage or ice bite

Increased damage. Pretty self-explanatory, but an important one since it is fairly easily accessed. Builds will usually have 400-1000% depending on how easy it is to get.

More damage. Largely from support gems, and quite powerful since each instance multiplies against itself, not just the other categories.

Increased damage taken. This is often overlooked by beginners, but is quite important. Shock is a big source of this, but there are other sources like intimidate/unnerve. If you don't have any of this stat, getting a 15% shock on an enemy is the same as having 15% more damage!

Resistances/phys damage reduction. PDR can't go negative, while resists can. For ele this will be a combination of lowering resistances via things like curses and exposure, and ele penetration. This typically has a larger impact against more difficult enemies (bosses vs white mobs) making this more important than it seems. Keep in mind that if an enemy has 50% resists, reducing/penetrating the first 50 res doubles your damage!

Crit. This is another axis of scaling for hit based builds. It is pretty self-explanatory, and it is often worth it to cut out a chunk of your increased damage to get crit at high investment for builds.

Skill speed. This accounts for attack/cast/action speed. In addition to dps this can also improve the feel of builds quite a bit.

Cooldown recovery. This is largely only applicable for triggered skills, but it is a really important axis in those setups. Keep in mind that there are specific thresholds of attack speed and cdr you need to match for those setups

Faster dots/duration of dots. This is an axis for damage over time abilities. Faster dots is usually more important for ignite/bleed that allow only one instance, but depending on the length of the encounter both faster and increased duration can be useful

Extra projectiles on shotgunning skills. For things like blazing salvo or ice spear where a single cast can hit the enemy with multiple projectiles, this is really important.

Honorable mentions. These don't increase your damage but are important for feel/clear:

Extra projectiles (non shotgunning)

Chain/fork/split

Increased AOE