[0.3c] Player power too high early in endgame

Just finished non-Uber Arbiter this run. Playing a casual chayula darkfire caster with SSF focus (only vendoring for currency, not buying). My main skill for bosses is Incinerate.

Just by the new crafting options (which i love), my character powerlevel is too high. I'm rolling with a +5 staff 150% increased chaos damage thanks to essences, greater/perfect transmutation/augmentation. Also i crafted the CI ES body armour with taken as chaos damage essence and reduced crit essence.

I heavily invest in defenses. I'm with 9000 ES with heavy invest in ES recharge and faster recharge start. Also i prioritize defensive spirit gems (like convalesence) over damage ones.

It was a little updown when i face the tier I difficult pinnacle. No one stood a chance. Hell, even arbiter didn't do the corridors or flame seeds, just finished him in 20 seconds.

Pinnacle 3 (King of the Mist, Xesht) was more of a challenge, but with my casual non-meta build with no top tier items (i don't have any lvl 20 skillgem!), i think the tier I fights (especially arbiter) were underwhelming, whereas 0.2 or 0.1 fight were rough, challenging and rewarding to overcome.

In my opinion, powerlevel is too high right now, and bossfights and pinnacle fights should be longer. Map balance it's ok, i feel in danger if i play overconfident in lvl 80 maps, but bossfights are just easy (and i can skip the mechanics)

Again and again: all depends on character, ascendancy and build.

Right now:
Ranged > Melee
Attack > Spells

I.e. ranged attack builds are gods, almost all of them. Then goes attack melee builds with wide AOEs, they doing also good and become gods of Endgame pretty quickly (always been, all patches).

Minion builds are good too, boring, require good commitment and very specific equipment, but viable.

Casters - are complete garbage (except some cheesing ascendancies, including your's, who has damage scaling from ascendancy), as for me. Equipment is extremely expensive and hard to craft (it has to be perfect to be usable, unlike attack builds, where we have plenty of room for trade-offs on mods on items). Damage scaling is bad, slow, weak, require wide and far spread on the tree towards monk sector if you start as a witch\sorc to get nodes for both defense and attack and still underperform comparing to other normal builds. T8 maps are ultimate barrier for many caster builds. And casters builds got nerfed gradually every league for no reason (they trying to fight back the most cheese builds and killing casters in general).

So, when your ascendancy scaling monk (or like mine Gemling Legionaire with grenades) rolling through maps having challenge only with T3 and higher bosses, there's always caster with 2-3x more expensive equipment struggling on T8 and still gets one shotted off-screen by Abyssals or Doryani Elites with railguns.

Summary: we need balance fixes to make casters\some melee stronger and faster in general, make all builds viable to be as strong as your monk or bow\crossbow builds in endgame. And THEN we need stronger enemies on T2-T3 bosses and T14-T15 maps. Or otherwise half of the builds will die and we will stuck back with 3 builds like it was in 0.2 and everyone leaving the game, because there's no fun, variativity to gameplay and zero room for creativity in builds.

P.S. Want some challenge - try pure melee or elemental caster builds.