Sahbak's page

AoA is notoriously difficult and unbalanced, so it shouldn't really be your point of reference.

5 people need elite adjustments, since AP's are written for 4. If your GM ran Golarion's Finest as is, against 5 players it's not really a hard fight as they're level 12 weak creatures.

I will say, from a GM standpoint, most fights do seem to be easy. The templates aren't particularly impressive or do much for level 12-15. A lot of fights are with the weak template which, IMO, make most fights trivial against 4/5 members parties. (Even if level wise it should be ok).
If your GM wants to run interesting/difficult encounters, I recommend running the teams from book 2, or taking inspiration from them and creating custom "monsters". They will be extreme encounters probably, but losing isn't the end of the world and will make your life more fun.

So, we've nearly finished Part 1.

First of all, let me say: the organisation of this book is terrible. Frequently to run an encounter I was frantically flipping between the team member templates and another creature or team member with specific stats in their encounter section. The frequent use of templates on the team members meaning that the stats as printed are not the ones to use made this even worse.

Also, I had to write up my own "rules document" because as presented the tournament just does not seem to allow for the huge range of options available at level 11 and higher. Most obvious is that many of the teams are melee only and have no way to deal with flying opponents even though flight is generally available at levels 8-10.

Most of the team fights were a bit too easy due to large party and flickmace prone lock. Not really the adventure's fault, but not ideal at the same time. I do wonder why the adventure would be called "Despair on Danger Island", when the tone is generally rather upbeat and positive.

Partly because they were finding the fights easy, the PCs didn't really have much interest in generally exploring the island other than to find other teams to fight. They also tried to specifically seek out other teams, and seemed a bit disappointed when I said there was basically no way to do that. Since they had no real direction, by the end I was ignoring the map and just having the PCs run into encounters in orders that seemed fun, such as the Kaiju Egg for foreshadowing and the odd monster lair if things had been quiet for a while.

I also moved some of the treasure packets into the monster lairs because you're supposed to get loot when you win an encounter, right? It was much more pleasing than just getting loot randomly and then having encounters with only XP reward. The book's suggest that the PCs gain XP even if they lose tournament bouts still makes the creature dens a bad bet (since they can die in the creature dens)

Because of the fights being relatively easy, the PCs had...

Can't comment on everything, but Ingdani does use the Ki Adept block from page 24 (Mentioned on page 8).

I'm running the book with a party of 3, without Epic Gamers using flickmaces, and even then I'm afraid most fights are going to be trivial. Honestly, most events that use the generic fighter blocks just seem... uninspired to me. It's supposed to be the most exciting fighting tournament in Golarion but at least for the qualifiers there are no exciting opponents.
I plan on reworking most teams to custom built characters with references to anime/manga/manhwas. It might be imbalanced but like most people mentioned in this thread, getting 10 feathers is extremely easy.