Before reading my long story below, here are my questions...
1) Should the players have reached level 4 before either the scriptorium or nine eaves after having made it through the Palace of Teeth? The way I read the milestone leveling is that they don't reach level 4 until they have all three stamps.
2) Did I do anything wrong in the way I played the encounter?
My players just failed at the encounter with Mrs. Pedipalp and they seem pretty upset with the complexity. Some background, the party make up was a ranged Slayer, Magus, Paladin and Warpriest. At the beginning of the combat encounter, Mrs. Pedipalp was second in initiative order after the warpriest who failed to hit her, she was able to move out of reach from any of the melee by climbing up the walls of the 30ft high room the encounter takes place in and cast Unadulterated Loathing on the ranged character making the warpriest the target. Now since the player is compelled to do all he can to stay 60ft away from that person, it took him completely out of the fight. The other three were already tapped with regard to spells and abilities, but tried to fight with the warpriest having a bow, but because he was a good character, was doing very little damage and the regen on mrs. pedipalp was overcoming it. Her next turn, she casted suggestion on the warpriest telling him, "Go to the garden and wait for me." This then took him out of the fight so they all decided to start running. Now the warpriest ran out of the room and double moved past the person with unadulterated loathing which, the player chose to play it that he ran the oppsite direction, back into the room with Mrs. Pedipalp. On her turn, she was in range to cast sleep on that player and it landed. The rest continued to head to the garden where the waited out the suggestion spell.
Now, they came up with a plan to light a fire, burning whatever they could at the bottom of the tower, trying to smoke her out. While they were getting the fire ready, Mrs. pedipalp, having the bow and arrows she took from the slayer was shooting at them. Landing hits. but they managed to get the fire lit. Now the stairs going up the tower says it has high narrow windows, so I chose to play mrs. pedipalp moving to one of those windows and busting it out so that she could breath and not get smoked out. The players then took this as a lost cause and decided to leave the Scriptorium and head to Nine Eaves as they needed that stamp yet as well.
