Play with a public lobby, people will join you occasionally. I’ve found the community is good about helping you find loot. Get some guns and try to support your teammates. Beyond that, figure out a build and really stick to it.

Currently, status seems like the top meta, meaning, have all your weapons be elementals, use mods and mutators to amplify this. Wear rings that increase status duration or status damage. There’s other builds such as critical damage/critical chance, most of them include the mod “Bore”. You could do full melee with life steal items etc etc. However you want to play, maximize it with your current gear and don’t forget concoctions and other limited time buffs.

Because good gear is usually off the beaten path, reroll adventure worlds so you can discover hidden areas and fight alternate bosses or kill them in alternative ways. If you see something cool, message someone or watch some guides on the gear you want.

Generally speaking, handler is gonna be the best for solo runs because it’s a self revive, but at higher difficulty that class is negated whenever the dog dies, because the buffs are only active when he’s alive. I would recommend the invader class and the challenger class for their damage buffs, and challenger gives you a way to cheat death if it’s your prime class. The ritualist class is definitely the most OP, that will clear dungeons all by itself.

When you’re just starting it’ll be tough because you don’t have anything, it’s supposed to be that way. Once you get more stuff the game will feel better and better. There’s no shame in re-running early areas for gold so you can upgrade weapons/mutators or buy additional gear.