In light of the revelations about Jack's power, fancy re-statting him to take his secondary powers into account?

Yeah, I think I'll go with telling the players about the enemies they can see, rather than relying on them not metagaming (which is a problem for my group).

Something I've noticed over the course of my campaign is that there's very little way to spring surprises on my players. This is mostly because you have to establish the groups prior to battle, in order to establish initiative. So unless I dedicate a couple of creatures to being stealth heavy (which limits their uses in other areas) or giving them Glamours/Veils (which gets a bit boring after a while), it becomes all but impossible to spring surprises on my players. It's also giving them free metagaming opportunities because they know exactly how many enemies they're going to be facing before the fight even starts.

I've tried experimenting with introducing the NPCs to the battle in tiers, so that minions will go in first to wear the PCs down a bit, then some heavy hitters and support mages. Then the boss battle. It's left a sour taste in my mouth though, since by all rights the PCs should be able to detect the ones out of the battle in some way (one of my PCs is a bulky speedster, so he plays scout fairly often).

I've also contemplated starting every battle with each (non-Hulking Size) NPC with a +1/+2 default stealth roll to their name, with exceptions for situations where it wouldn't make sense. That or I'd limit Alertness checks to the zone the characters are in at the time (again with exceptions for things open areas and the likes).

So how do you guys do it? I'd appreciate any advice you're willing to give because this is one of the bigger problems I've found since starting this campaign.

Spell Resistance should have a mandatory Catch, since it can be stacked with Toughness powers to make you virtually immune to magic, which would make it theoretically more powerful than Physical Immunity.

We're pretty open with character goals in my group, at least as far as combat is concerned. I'm trying to wean my players off the "we have to win" mindset.

Any tips?

Sure, that works. I'd intended it to satisfy sunlight Catches anyway, just forgot to put it in.

The novels aren't actually a game, guys. They're not going to correspond perfectly to the rules.

No longer exists. You only get 1 mild consequence per stunt unless you place a limitation on how you can use your extra consequence.

IIRC this was changed between the prerelease PDF's release and the final book's release.

The physical rulebook is the latest release though, right? I'm just out of date on the pdf?