End Boss Escape

It's not an uncommon trope in comics for have a villain on the ropes throw up a fist and go "Next time, Gadget, NEEXT TIIIIME!" and make a dramatic escape. I'm trying to figure out how to do this in MA. I know there's a setting for bosses to run for the door when a certain trigger is hit, but the problem I hit there is against a decent sized medium-to-high level team that knows what it's doing on a medium/large map... I don't think they'll make it.

This is my situation. My goal, as a creator, is to make sure the bad guy escapes. That's part of the plot. In fact, I want to guarantee it. Since I can't do stuff like have those nifty teleport-upon-defeat animations some NPCs have, that means a dash for the door. It is quite likely that the team will tear the boss apart long before it gets there if I just set it to run away at 50% or 75% or something (if it even runs. The trigger doesn't always work, or the boss just aggros right through it and keeps fighting). At the same time, I want it to feel like an actual fight. The baddie was confronted, there was a struggle, and they got away.

Suggestions on how to do this? Like a way to get the boss to be replaced with an NPC at a certain point, or make the boss vanish or something? Or set it to Betray to Allied at 50%? I dunno. Any input would be great.

Give the boss some ridiculous secondary defense power, like extreme regen or willpower, and set him to run when he's down to one minion left. Make sure he's an AV as well. This will practically ensure that his minions will die before he does, and it'll make it rather difficult for even a full team to take him out, since willpower and regen AVs resist regen debuffs 100%. And this way, he'll be running at much higher health. Also, he'll have a revive power. I haven't tried this, but it might work: Have a glowy triggered to become clickable after the AV is killed. Obviously, set the AV to only boss needed to complete. Make the glowy essential for mission completion. Then go into test mode, use the dev tools to kill his minions until he starts running, and then once the AV is running, use the dev tools to kill him. See if he revives and then starts running again, and if he does, see if the mission ends when he gets to the door. If that does work, the villain will have two chances to get away.

This way, it will be like the classic villain move of sacrificing their minions to make a clean getaway. It'll still be a struggle, but the villain will cut his losses and high tail it. Of course, if the story involves the team eventually confronting and defeating the villain for real, you'd have to make another version of him that isn't so retardedly hard to kill for the later encounter.

I've never tried this, but see if you can add an ambush at the same time he escapes. It may give the window of opportunity he needs.

There is absolutely no way to make 100% sure that your villain escapes. Making him a near-impossible to kill AV doesn't make him actually impossible to kill....and is immersion-breaking when the player finally faces down the defeatable version and pwns him.

I suggest possibly planting some clues for the player to find before they face the villain, suggesting that he might be able to get away. Put them in the same mission, so that even though the player knows the villain has hacked into the city's mediport network or whatever, they can't do anything about it right now. That makes it less cheap when the player defeats the villain and later finds out he teleported to a secret base upon defeat.

Unless the player is a /traps corruptor...or you have a team with a lot of immobs...or the player taunts a lot, which overrides the "run away" setting...

The point is, if it's neccessary for the story that the villain escapes, you shouldn't rely on a boss set to run.

Just wondering:

Does the Villain reaching the door constitute a FAILED mission? Won't that cheese players off that they have to fail the mission to proceed the way they're supposed to?

Of course, this would be easier if the devs allowed us to let enemies TP out when they reach a certain % of health like a few AVs do.

OR, you could be a total jerk and have the villain be a HOSTAGE and make up some BS about him having an invincibility field (that he'll obviously forget to use in the final battle). So when you defeat his "minions" he runs off and the mission ends. Trying to hit him would result in "Invalid target"... and cheese off a lot of players. =P

I believe you still get the ticket bonus if a mission fails, and since there's no arc complete XP bonus in MA, it doesn't matter if you fail, from a mechanical perspective.