First off, what level and type of character are you playing it with, and what is your difficulty setting? If you are playing at anything higher than heroic (blue side), then that will effect the strength and numbers of the mobs in your mission. As far as strong minions goes, they do tend to be a bit stronger than standards. A lot of that depends on what power sets you are choosing for them, too. Some of the power sets can be very tough.
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
In addition to Telstar's request for clarification, I'd also like to know how the mission pacing is set. If it is Staggered it could result in some groups being tougher than others and you could get unlucky about what you are first running into. Try changing to Flat or Ramp Up to get a better feel for your group.
And Telstar is very correct about custom critters being harder than standard mobs. I've about decided that they aren't really appropriate as a full mission spawn at this time - especially with the arc size limit being a real crimp on creating a fully fleshed out group (6-8 minions with 2-4 lieutenants and a couple of bosses) AND having a real story involving more than 1 or 2 missions.
And unfortunatly no - the NPC powersets are not available. I wish they were or I wish we could rename/recostume existing standard mobs for more seemless use in custom groups but like they say: "wish in one hand..."
I'm currently trying to write a story, and have already made a custom enemy group. Now, there is really just a few problems that I'm having. One, I have created this group with 1 Lieutenant type, and 4 minion types. When I test play the mission, the mob groups that I get is a group of 3, 2 of the Lieutenants and one random mob. Shouldn't it be the other way around if it even spawns the Lieutenant? I'm testing this out with a level 20 on the default difficulty settings.
Another thing, the difficulty on my minions are insane! I have them all on easy as far as what skills they can do, but they are still incredibly difficult when I perceived to be making trash mobs to keep my mission interesting. Is there a way where you can give them just brawl and some random ranged ability to kind of keep the overall difficulty down where it is suitable for lower levels? I earned my Virtual Victim badge real fast testing these guys out.
To sum all of this up, I think my main issues are that my minions are pretty much as difficult as my Lieutenants, while my Lieutenants are at the difficulty that I want. That and I am curious if there is a way to control the amount of Lieutenants to Minion ratio so that the Minions will be fought much more frequently than the Lieutenants. This whole thing is making me scared to add more Lieutenant types or any Boss+ types.
Thanks for any help, I'm sure I overlooked something stupid, as I was trying to do this at 6AM with no sleep.