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I really don't see the problem, though I've only GM'd 1/2 of an AP. Book 1's tend to be party killers. Haunting of Harrowstone has a monster that can 1 or 2 hit every level 3-4 in the party. From what I'm reading of Wormwood Mutiny, part 3 of that adventure is a 'lets see how many PC's we have left' thing.
I had a pretty well optimized party for my book 1-3 Carrion Crown AP, and went through 4 PC's when all was said and done, two dying to the end boss of Broken Moon with one spell. I held a few punches back here and there, but things like
and
are so far out from the party's power levels, that deus ex machina's have to be injected (Frank N. Stein for the former, and a very "lets not play this monster right" tactics section for the latter).
As a matter of fact, when we start Skull & Shackles in a few weeks, I've go the PC's rolling up Gestalt characters to improve survivability for all of those ridiculous PC wiping encounters. There are some things that I've considered adding Advanced to simply because the group will be APL+1 for Gestalt, but I can easily see how all those +2's can add up to the same level of party death that is very real in the opening acts of the AP.
My players are the kind that optimize their PCs fairly well, which generally makes the later parts of the APs a walkthrough unless I adjust the encounters. The way I've done this so far is by either applying the Advanced template as carn describes above or, if that's not enough, by adding a couple of HDs. Sometimes I also add a couple of minions, mostly to boss fights, since the problem there is that the boss don't have the same action economy as my PCs. I never add any treasure or XP, since that would only aggravate the problem.
My experience of this is that it works fairly well, as long as you make sure that the encounter don't overpower the players. There have been a couple of instances where I overdid it, but since I use HeroLab to run my combats it was fairly easy to rebalance the encounter on the fly by removing a couple of HDs to avoid a TPK.
Another possibility I sometimes use is: Add a lieutenant or the like.
A (Boss CR-2) creature (which, of course, has to fit the situation) increases overall CR by 1, halves the group's action advantage, and can be used for some interesting group tactics.
i have given every monster in APs i run maximum hps
this is:
easy and hardly any work at all for the GM
makes them robust enough to get off one or two tricks per combat to challenge the players
otherwise as mentioned, for example, an AC 24 220 hp CR 14-15 beast may not even get to have a go against an optimised party
i have also asked players to start doing average damage to cut down on dice rolling / time
i aslo often do average damage as well....for example in KM last night the beastie did 16d6+40 damage, and i would never roll that many dice
i have given every monster in APs i run maximum hps
Depending on your party this is not a catch all. If the problem is that your PCs have optimized their ACs and the monsters only hit on a 20, giving max HP to the monsters only prolong the fight without adding any credible threat to the PCs.
as offence outclasses defence i never find a problem in hitting the party, its keeping the poor beasties alive long enough to do something
there are many monsters that will hit themselves on a 4 or 5, so offense is not the issue
i dont appreciate max hp isnt a catch all but it is if you dont have the time
having said that if a PC cast Mirror image and gets 6-8 images the monster may as well give up
