Minimum Number of Enemies Despawn (prevents stuck)

[EyeLuvBooks]

Something that was often a problem on Live and I've noticed a few times recently is mobs getting knocked into/through a wall or other obstruction. I recently saw this on a mission and fortunately someone had an AoE power that could reach the target.

 

My suggestion is that every instanced mission have a minimum number of mobs at which point the mission is declared finished and the mobs despawn with no rewards given.

 

The minimum would scale with party size where 1-2 would be 1 mob, 3-4 would be 2 mobs and so on with the highest being 4 mobs.

 

So your team (or you solo) goes in and does the mission, which is a Defeat All. On a team of 7-8 when the number of mobs in the building decreased to 4 the mission would end.

 

Any mobs stuck in the architecture can thus be ignored but they also won't grant rewards but TBH the rewards from 4 mobs is pretty slight over the course of an 8-person mission.

[GM Sijin]

It'd feel a little weird being in a defeat all and the mission completing with some of the guys still standing. While your solution is probably a lot easier to implement, I'd rather see the pathing AI updated to detect when it's probably stuck and have the enemies AI overridden to jump somewhere nearby. I'd say update it so enemies can't get stuck in terrain but I'm not sure that's viable without an engine update.

[Vanden]

Stories tell that early in the CoH testing process that is indeed how missions worked, but testers found it jarring that missions to defeat all enemies would complete when there were still visible enemies fighting.

[Piyerus]

In the new Kings Row arcs that were added in the issue 24 beta (forget the names of the arcs) there was a new enemy behavior used where if the mission boss was defeated, the rest of the mobs in the map (other than the ones in the boss's group) would flee and leave the map. Something like that could be used so that it doesn't seem weird to win a defeat all with enemies still standing.