City of Heroes Homecoming Explains Why Enemies Flee

Every City of Heroes player knows the moment. You've got a mob nearly beaten, your next attack is lined up, and then the enemy turns around and sprints off into the distance. It's realistic, sure. People in a fight they're losing tend to leave. But this is also a game where you can build a ridiculous costumed superhero, and realism isn't always what players are after.

Now one of the developers behind Homecoming has explained what is actually going on under the hood when foes bolt. The answers are more interesting than you might expect, and they're already shaping changes on the way.

Enemies With Feelings

The headline detail is that City of Heroes' enemy AI is more elaborate than its age might suggest. Every enemy has its own set of programmed "feelings," and two of them matter most here: confidence and fear.

Those two values feed into a morale-breaking system. The clearest example is what happens when you defeat a boss. The minions around it can lose their nerve and flee. Digging into the code, the developers found that once this flight response triggers, enemies are set to run at least 200 feet away. That explains why a scattered group can end up so far from where the fight started.

There's also a separate "avoid" behavior, which is supposed to steer enemies away from danger. According to the developer's post, it doesn't actually work in combat. When you see enemies running around inside an area-of-effect circle, that's fear at work, not the avoid logic.

How Your Build Plays Into It

This might sound like trivia, but it has real consequences for how different archetypes play. Archetypes are City of Heroes' character classes, and some of them are making their own lives harder without realizing it.

Scrappers and Stalkers, the game's melee damage dealers, are a good example. They tend to go after targets with higher health first. Taking those down can be exactly what triggers the lower-level mobs nearby to break and run. In other words, the smart-looking choice can be the one that turns a tidy fight into a chase.

Controllers have a trickier balancing act. Their job is locking enemies down, but damage over time effects can build up too much fear in their targets. At the same time, their mezzes (crowd control effects like holds and stuns) stop foes from attacking players, and attacking players is how enemies build confidence. So a Controller can accidentally push enemies toward panic from both sides: more fear, and no way to gain the confidence that would keep them standing their ground.

What's Changing in Issue 28 Page 4

All this investigation has led to concrete changes for Homecoming. Issue 28 Page 4 will fix the avoid behavior so it works as originally intended.

In practice, that means enemies caught in a placed area effect won't simply gain fear and scatter. Instead, they'll try to move out of the zone and then stay out of it. The update also adjusts how far terrified mobs will run once they break.

Not every annoyance goes away, of course. The Tsoo Sorcerers will very likely remain the same irritating mix of teleporting, wind-blowing and healing they've always been. But players who like dropping Rain of Fire or Caltrops on a crowd should find those powers behave in a more predictable way.

Our Take

What stands out here isn't just the fix. It's how the fix came about. Rather than tweaking numbers until complaints quiet down, the Homecoming team went into the AI, worked out how confidence, fear and avoidance actually interact, and then explained it publicly. That kind of transparency suggests a team that understands its players care about the systems, not just the results.

For players, the most useful takeaway may be the build advice hidden inside the explanation. If you play a Scrapper, Stalker or Controller, knowing that your target priority or your damage over time can trigger a rout gives you something to experiment with today, before Page 4 lands.

It also fits a broader pattern we've been following. Older MMORPGs are increasingly being maintained by teams willing to dig into decades-old code, from the Star Wars Galaxies Outer Rim server building out new content to the Marvel Heroes TAHITI server rethinking its balance approach. Combat behavior fixes like this one sit alongside other targeted cleanups, such as the Embers Adrift combat timer patch, as signs that small systems can still make a big difference to how a game feels.

It is worth watching how Page 4's changes play out once players get their hands on them. Area-effect powers could become noticeably more valuable if enemies stop fleeing in panic and simply step aside. Whether the new run distances make fights feel tighter, or create fresh frustrations, is something the community will have to judge in practice.