Can I see more of your surprise strike ability - like the whole set of code for it? (Open your .user file as a text file and copy out that <thing> element). xIndex and xCount should be set up automatically by the program, as long as these are class abilities bootstrapped to a class, with their levels specified by a ClSpecWhen tag. So with it failing at such a basic level, I'm not sure what's going on.
Also, from the class itself, maybe the bootstrap elements for surprise strike - I'd expect they look like this:
Code:
<bootstrap thing="cSneakAtt">
<autotag group="ClSpecWhen"tag="3"/>
</bootstrap>