What happened to my touch of death damage

[yzeew]

I got my build to a good place and decided to go to the artificer to advance to torment 3. I beat up to the level 35 artificer with ~7 minutes remaining. Beat up Duriel on torment 2, so I should be close at least, but when I go to level 40 to upgrade, the dungeon is literally 10x harder, where I wouldn't finish in an hour. My defense seems good.
Checking, I see my touch of death, what I focused my build around, seems to no longer be doing damage to anyone. My AoE skills snuff out the weak guys, and I can literally see myself hitting the elites with no damage, every being blown out of them. They seem invulnerable to all but my AoE skill, pestilent swarm, so 1 elite takes minutes, not seconds, to beat.
Is it a bug or is there literally a 10x increase in difficulty between artificer lvl 35 and 40? I don't know what else I could do to increase my power at this difficulty level.

[phosTR]

they buffed the HP and defenses of mobs in Pits to insane levels. it's ridiculous now.

[nano]

I thought I was the only one who encountered this problem, although it's true that I make my own character builds and never look at other people's builds or the website. I'm running into a wall to reach Toment 3 that didn't appear in previous seasons.

I've tried a barbarian deathblow, and from about level 35 onward, I'm having trouble dealing damage. I'm still getting kills, but very slowly.

I imagine you're thinking I don't have items that give me damage, but the problem is, that's not the case. First, I do infinite deathblow, I have the gloves at +300%, the amulet to overpower every 270, +116% speed attack, and a thousand other things that should make my damage output enormous, but that's not the case. In fact, I went to a build website to check what I was doing wrong, but it turns out I have better stats and items than the builds on the website.

So I don't know what's going on, but the worst part is that if I use the whirlwind ability, I do slightly less damage... How is this possible? I have glyphs for weapon mastery, +80%, etc.

Is this a bug or something? Even my overpower is 2500%, and it's barely noticeable when it's activated...

[wespe___o=/;;;:*]

Some Spiritborn builds have become... subpar, IF you follow Meta.
That said, my builds all work and press solid damage. Though you require lots of Meta-knowledge to keep eg. a lv14 Legendary till lv52 (same refresh) because of a very important function. Somehow Blizzard ****ed up in S8 to .. well, unholy levels
Seems it´s not about enjoying the ride anymore, but milking the players everywhere - for the record: with very unsatisfying skins + predatory Asia grinder methods.
I don´t know anyone who could farm S8 Endtier items reliably - even famous youtubers struggle extremely. Guess we just use S7 items again ... lol

-> Anyway.. Key is not just relying on perfected items, but understanding the way to get there. Way too many GUIDES focus on T3/4 Endgame (Lv60 Paragon 150+ ♥♥♥♥)

PS: Not everybody likes braindead Pit-runs. Last season (S7) allowed for nice landscape stuff, just now we are back to old "mediocre D4 standard". Imho, If Blizzard devs mess up S9 too, I switch back to PoE
PPS: Now I wish there was something like GrimDawn2 , where every 2nd build can press hardest content. Did I mention HC is more unfun with D4 than PoE, all that 1shot crap sucks as you´re forced to invest 30-40% of your performance into survivability, BUT somehow Blizzard managed to mess it up for some classes to astonishing levels...
(eg: My Sorceress vs ... Rogue ---- yes, light years apart)