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Depends on your definition of powerful.
I tend to run campaigns that include a great deal of intrigue and deception. The one that had me fall in love with the (vanilla) rakshasa began in Bloodcove. The pc's uncovered a plot by the local Aspis Consortium boss, and over the campaign pursued him across the length of Garund, uncovering and exposing his machinations along the way.
But the Aspis boss had been dumped to the crocs back in Bloodcove; a rakshasa had stolen his identity and used the organisation, dozens of agents, the ruling powers of four different nations, the Pathfinders, and even the PC's in pursuit of resurrecting his former lover, a far more powerful rakshasa and devotee of the undead Osirion Pharaoh who's name I can't remember.
Between shapeshifting and mind-reading, the rakshasa turned the pc's friends, families, alllies, acquaintances and a vast array of innocent, irrelevant npc bystanders against them. Towards the end of the campaign, they tortured a (relatively innocent) pick-pocket for hours, just because of the layered paranoia induced by this big bad.
For the showdown, in a Petra style temple in Osirion, I set the big-bad (Marius, by the way) at max hp + fudge. He dropped in three rounds. As I described his death, I was so scared that it'd be an anticlimax. The players' whooping annoyed my neighbours into banging on the walls of my apartment.
IRL five years later, the pc's these guys play vary between habitually mistrustful and outright delusionarily paranoid.
CR 10.
Edit: avatar relevant.