Act 3 Phasebeasts on the way to Azmodan with the fast, teleporter, desecration, arcane, extra health, reflect affixes were worse than any boss in the game. To be exact I'd rather fight four D3 bosses at one time than fight those again.
It's the fact that they already have the teleport mechanic and are already fast and powerful that makes the fights ridiculous with four affixes. When you give them Jailer|Molten|Frozen|Arcane it becomes Jailer|Molten|Frozen|Arcane|Teleporter|Fast - but that's part of the design team's choice to give the enemies cooler skills with fewer restrictions than the "heroes". IMO there should never be more than one CC skill on a champion pack, particularly when most escape skills have some sort of long cooldown. Getting jailed while the freeze bombs appear all around you is just stupid.
I actually have no problem at all with "shopping" on the AH for gear...the problem has just been that the gear is generic and hasn't really synergized well with any of the skills. I've been having a lot of fun with my Barb since 1.0.4 dropped and it's because I was able to take The Three Hundredth Spear and build my Throw Barb around that item. Before they redesigned a bunch of the "Legendaries" there was no discernible reason to even call them Legendary. The original 300th Spear had some MF in place of the two large skill boosts - whoopity doo!
Know what I'm doing now? I'm walking around in A3 with a Shaefer's Hammer and using reflect damage skills (profile) because that weapon - my fav from D2 - happens to have a cool ability that triggers "when hit". How they could have worked on this game for so long without learning that skills and gear are interdependent is truly mind boggling. 1.0.5 is going to address many non-gear related issues as well, so it should make the game even more fun.