I personally set the enemies to a non-hostile team, such as civilians and then use a region. I set the trigger to:

When: On region enter
Do: Change NPC X to team ganger (or another hostile team).

Technically that uses a region and trigger, but it's a good reliable way.

Hm, ok right on, thanks.

Oh also, if you copy an enemy, it seems like the properties that you've changed don't carry over to the copy. It also seems like you can't set more than one enemy's properties at once if you have two different types of enemies selected (i.e. lonestar mage, lonestar samurai) is there a way to like, quickly set all the enemy spawner properties in a level at once?

The easiest way to do that is make one spawner, and then drag-copy it over and over again.

More complicated to setup but easy once the backend work is done, is using templates. Make a template for both the character sheet and equipment sheets then set actor spawners to use them.