Yeah the devs went overboard with the customs. Orginally they were already harder because the use the players damage scale and not the weak scale of the PvE critters. This was good.
Then they not only gave the CC's an WAY overboard ranged attack, but they added A LOT more powers to the "standard" critter powers options. So in essence they way more of a challenge than before even for high level toons. Low level toons HAVE ZERO chance angainst the current custom critters. Brilliant! 
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
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Yeah the devs went overboard with the customs. Orginally they were already harder because the use the players damage scale and not the weak scale of the PvE critters. This was good.
Then they not only gave the CC's an WAY overboard ranged attack, but they added A LOT more powers to the "standard" critter powers options. So in essence they way more of a challenge than before even for high level toons. Low level toons HAVE ZERO chance angainst the current custom critters. Brilliant!
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/agreed.
Its to the point that I almost feel like between this and what happened with PVP some people need to lose their jobs. If I was supposed to "fix" something at my job and ended up making it less used/less popular/worse more than once, I know I would expect to lose mine.
Especially if I had people on test telling me that that was exactly what was going to happen before I went ahead and did it. With this patch, and from what I understand with the changes to PVP in the last issue, that's exactly what has happened here.
Is face planting every 5 seconds an issue 
I do agree though. Some of these guys can be insanely OP'd, and at the lower levels your team can get slaughtered.
Your best bet is to just leave everything easy until the mid or late thirties.
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Your best bet is to just leave everything easy until the mid or late thirties.
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I'm at a loss for how to make them easier. I tried turning the minions into Lts (so the group was all Lts, no minions or bosses), thinking that would change how many of them spawned...and I ended up with a map full of Lts, in groups of 3.
The best I have come up with is war mace/regen. As a minion, they get 2 mace attacks & throwing knives. From regen they get fast healing and quick recovery.
It's too bad we can't just take powersets from pre-existing enemies and assign them to a custom model (with limits, of course - no rularuu netterling powers on custom mobs, etc).
In other words, let us take a hellion thug's powers and apply them to a custom model...
Selecting different maps has helped cut the minions down to fewer spawns, and fewer 3-groups. I also tried mixing in pre-made Hellion minions (which can work for one mission in the arc), but that's sort of hit or miss for which minion spawns. I'll try different ratios of custom-to-standard minions on different maps and see if anything makes me happy.
I'm so glad they're lowering the value of rewards for AE missions, setting caps for tickets etc... wouldn't want the screw up the "risk vs reward" system they have down to a an art after all these years...
Yep with probs like this, you end up using existing enemies only which makes AE missions just so much more exciting...
*facepalm*
A wise man knows...
He knows nothing and stays silent.
A fool thinks he knows everything...
And proves he's wrong loudly.
I would like to see the same kind of attention and intensity that Positron showed toward the balances in over rewards focused NOW on these overboard custom critters.
Failure to do that is going to limit the success of this feature if people are "forced" to use PvE critters for the majority of the arc due only to CC's being grossly overpowered.
It is a BIG issue and it needs some immediate attention, IMHO of course. 
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
An even easier way to fix it would be to allow us to pick pool powers for enemies; being able to pick fighting as an enemy's primary would help a lot.
Or just allow us to choose only 1 set (one w/ attacks) for enemies...
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An even easier way to fix it would be to allow us to pick pool powers for enemies
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I'm all for that (doesn't really help me now, though). I'd also like access to the weaker level 1-14 powers for minions/lts/bosses that locks custom mobs into this level range for lower level mission arcs.
Is everyone in this thread trying to play against custom foes at their usual "purple-foes-or-nothing!" difficulty settings?
If so, there's your problem right there.
I have yet to try anything above the second difficulty level as at that level red-con custom-foes tend to be dangerously close to killing me every battle. But I may get brave.
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Is everyone in this thread trying to play against custom foes at their usual "purple-foes-or-nothing!" difficulty settings?
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No, my tests are all done at difficulty 1. And it's not that the minions are so hard they kill me (they don't). But what they do is so much more damage than normal minions (like Hellions) that I end up having to stop and rest so often that it's not fun. Then the rest power doesn't recharge before I need it again...and that's even less fun.
I think its a good question and the answer for me is I've tested at various levels. The bottom line is it "still" outta whack in the amount of damage and needs to be brought in line with PvE critters.
In addition to that don't forget that instead of just having a couple of attacks on standard they now have even more and have just become too deadly overall. Things like standard minions getting darkest night....
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
I strongly recommend using stock mobs for low level arcs. They're specifically balanced for those levels, with few attacks and all that. (And some, like the Vahz, still manage to be pretty heinous before DOs/SOs.)
My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City
I'm tired of stock mobs.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
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I'm tired of stock mobs.
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Me too, but unfortunately customs are exceptionally nasty if you're trying to level up through MA and don't have SOs/IOs yet.
When the add the ability to just add powers to Standard in i15, they need to crank down Standard to be EASY and let us add challenge, cause right now we can't take any away.
I advise staying away from AE until at least lvl 22 if not higher. If you check the numbers you'll see xp in AE has been cut at least 50% if not up to 66%. Or is it that the xp is cut only in the lower levels...I can't say with certainty.
In my opinion AE only serves two purposes now: exploring player created content and tickets. I only speak for myself when I say I won't pay a visit to AE again until my characters are minimum lvl 22 if not higher.
As for the problem with customs..you're right. Custom critters are too tough now for lowbie. They have too many powers to your too few.
Yeah, I dislike using the stock mobs too as a crucial part of the story.
I like making custom mobs, because I like to have more plausible looking mobs in my arcs. For example you can't find generic looking bad guys who wear ski masks and use sub machine guns in the actual in-game roster.
But the other day I got a feedback which went something like "Your arc is nearly unplayable because of the mobs. We had to quit it early on because the arc is impossible, shame tho because it seemed like an interesting story."
So I begun sending /tells and asking what part in particular makes it harder. You see I actually try to change the difficulty in the arcs rather than replying "oh well, maybe you should make a brute or stop sucking, I like challenge!!!"
So it turned out the guys were lvl 16 and I checked it out on my lvl 17 brute just to see what they were talking about.
And yeah, guess what, I got mauled. My 2nd mission had these armed security guards with AR/Em and they totally destroyed me.
Something is indeed wrong here.
Also on a side-note, I don't think Elite Bosses should deal 2,2k damage with a single attack on a lvl 50 player.
Add in unstoppable and you got yourself a winner. Also when that happens during the very last mission of the arc, a complete joke.
Send constructive feedback about it and get a reply saying "Well excuse me, princess, but that's the way I like MMYYYYYYYYYYY arc!" 
Edit:
And yeah I know, the players can't influence their EB damage too much.
And the ranged attack change still hasn't fixed the "run all over the place like a retard" bug that occurs with bosses.
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I advise staying away from AE until at least lvl 22 if not higher. If you check the numbers you'll see xp in AE has been cut at least 50% if not up to 66%. Or is it that the xp is cut only in the lower levels...I can't say with certainty.
In my opinion AE only serves two purposes now: exploring player created content and tickets. I only speak for myself when I say I won't pay a visit to AE again until my characters are minimum lvl 22 if not higher.
As for the problem with customs..you're right. Custom critters are too tough now for lowbie. They have too many powers to your too few.
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This, exactly. It's nowhere near worth the headache. I was getting more xp from greens in mercy than stock mobs in MA at level 8.
In fact, at level 37, +1 custom elite bosses in MA seem to give LESS xp than a single Chief Soldier in the warzone. Im gonna have to go back and check that actually, it seems way too low.
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This, exactly. It's nowhere near worth the headache. I was getting more xp from greens in mercy than stock mobs in MA at level 8.
In fact, at level 37, +1 custom elite bosses in MA seem to give LESS xp than a single Chief Soldier in the warzone. Im gonna have to go back and check that actually, it seems way too low.
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Patrol XP doesn't seem to apply inside the MA. At level 44, same mobs:
+1 minion (outside/inside): 3292/2195 = 1.49977
+1 boss (outside/inside): 16459/10973 = 1.49995
Don't ask me why though, I think it's pretty silly myself.
As for minions becoming too strong, I have to agree. I have a 5-25 arc that mixed custom mobs with stock ones to try and get a balance across the whole range. It was a bit on the tough side but perfectly doable before (I used some dual blades mixed with katana and mace, it used to be pure katana and mace and I mixed them up to help the lowbies and achieved a pretty decent balance).
Now I'm actually contemplating raising the minimum level because lowbies are having an exceedingly tough time in there
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Patrol XP definitely does not work in AE, but I believe it does eat debt.
Dec out.
lowbies are hard to play especially on mission where people put in a forced level spawn situation. if I am level 6 and i zone in a map and all of a sudden i am level 45 fighting level 45's my powers don''t seem to scale properly damage wise and the critters seem to never miss. this is while solo trying other peoples arcs. i like soloing missions but have found it hard to do on a lowbie.
Look for the LBMA tag. I've found lots of missions, many with customs that weren't any harder than the regular game. Or if they were harder, I didn't even notice.
Dec out.
I've been trying to use a custom group for my low level solo arc (levels 1-14), but since the patch, it just isn't working. No matter what power-set I use, they do way too much damage. The "weakest" I've come up with is melee/melee (like War Mace/Mace). But then they still do too much damage, they just fold like paper when you hit them. Which makes single minions a laugh, 2 minions more or less okay, and 3+ minions no fun at all.
Is there any way to flip this around: higher defense, low damage (or fewer attacks)? The whole point of using the custom group is for "color" and "story".
My test character is a level 2 Scrapper (Claws/Regen) straight out of the Tutorial zone.