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I just ran No Response from Deepenmar last night. Aside from the Boss fight at the end of the Module my party mowed through the encounters w/o challenge to the party. The mooks the party ran into could not hit most of the party as with the exception of the Pregen Samurai were well designed and had AC's 20+their level and most of the Mooks were CR3 so they could only hit on a natural 20 even the cylipides were hitting less than 40% of the time they lasted about 3 rounds.
My suggestion to the Pazio staff is to eliminate the multi CR3 type encounters and replace them w/ fewer higher CR critters. For instance I modified the Graveyard encounter I replaced the 8 wights with 4 wraiths this increased the challenge to the party and made the encounter easier to run for the me The GM.
Mooks in a 7-11 module should be no more than CR-2 otherwise the party will just mow them down w/o any challenge and that is no fun for the party or the GM.
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In my experience, the CR system doesn't work when it comes to calculating the encounter level (EL) with multiple creatures in the encounter.
The CR system says that when you have two creatures of the same CR, you add +2 to the CR to generate the EL. This never works, the value is more like +1, based on my experiences.
For example, I had a level 4 party kill 50 zombies in a campaign. 50 zombies is an EL around level 11, which should be impossible. It took awhile, but they did it without being in extreme danger.
If the EL adjustment was +1, the encounter level would be an 5.5, which is what you can expect when playtesting.
Having said that, you can't modify scenarios/modules when you run PFS. The best we can do is describe the deficiencies with the game, scenario, or module.
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Just a note, the level of this module is 7-9, not 7-11. If you had PCs of 10 and 11 playing, they technically should not have earnt the chronicle.
Also, the vast majority of the modules are written with 4 characters in mind. We had a similar experience running Ruby Phoenix with six players.
I am halfway through running this with a level 7 party of five and 3/4 of the fights have been challenging and harrowing. The wight combat in particular was very draining. Remember aid another actions - the monsters can easily grant their friends a +2 to hit which stacks. Suddenly three useless creatures can grant a nasty heavy hitter a whopping +6 to hit. It gets worse when that heavy hitter has power attack or poison.
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All My players were in the right tier. I used 7 to 11 in the thread title
because this is not the first time in 7 to 11 modules-scenarios that I have seen them throw worthless mooks at parties that could not hit them in melee.
even with aid another none of the lesser baddies could have ht 2/3 of the party except on a 20 because the 4 players were expericenced playrers with optimized characters.
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PFS is like a box of chocolates. Season 4 bragging a six character design, earlier seasons planning for four, no one expects the Gnome color spray DC to be so high with misfortune and a wand of persistence.
4e is choreographed, this system, PFS, is so easily broken, the game designers will have a hard time planning 50 zombies doing anything. That Gnome sprays undead too.
At Gen-Con, if he does not die, it's just fate, but a balanced encounter does not exsist. One trick ponies will stampede the game from now on. Welcome back to what killed 3.5.
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I was reading the scaling for The Price of Friendship, I respect the great effort spent adjusting for four players. If this is the wave of the future (Season 5), I just hope they redo the pregens, or at least make 10 more. A 7th level Kool-Aid man summoner, a 1st level Stooge Monk with dirty tricks. The CMDs of Valeros and Kyra will have everyone off the deck of the Throaty Mermaid. I just "care" that new folks will never see high level games if they don't have broken builds and optimized stats.
I do not want all "14's" either but if we as DM fiddle too much TPKs will hurt feelings.