Ambulas is a cutting-edge Corpus combat proxy, serving at Hades as boss of the Pluto system. Apart from being heavily armed, its most dangerous feature is the Animo processor, which allows it to learn on its own whenever it is defeated in combat, ensuring that Ambulas proxies cannot be defeated by the same strategy twice.
Ergo Glast, who is responsible for the Animo processor's creation during his time with the Corpus, tasks the Tenno with tracking down and destroying the Ambulas manufacturing plant in order to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe which occurred when the Orokin made similar strides with advanced AI.
After defeating it and finishing the mission, the player will receive Trinity component blueprints. Upon death, Ambulas has a chance of dropping Morphics as well.
Challenging Ambulas on Hades, Pluto requires 20 Animo Nav Beacons. Upon successful completion of the mission, 10 Animo Beacons will be refunded.
These Nav Beacons are obtained through defeating and hacking Ambulas proxies that are deployed via Condor Dropships in Corpus open-air tilesets (such as Corpus Ice Planet and Corpus Outpost). These dropships spawn in an interval of 3-5 minutes, making endless missions an optimal choice for farming them. In Defense Missions like Outer Terminus, the dropship will spawn after wave 1, every 2 minutes and 30 seconds making Defense one of the better options.
Another good option for Animo Nav Beacons is Regna, a rescue mission on Pluto. Very often the stage will start with the player outside - if not, abort the mission and repeat. When you do start outside, run around a little until a dropship engages, and look at its undercarriage to see if it is carrying an Ambulas. If not, abort the mission and repeat. Once you successfully hack an Ambulas and takes its beacons, speed clear the mission. While this limits your beacons to 5 every 3 or 4 minutes, it can be argued that it is a much more reliable method given that you're getting your beacons at the start of the mission, and thus guaranteeing that proceeding with the mission will be worthwhile.
Note, that only Condor Dropships in Pluto deploy Ambulas proxies, although in other Corpus-controlled planets like Jupiter and Europa these dropships are still present, deploying a squadron of Corpus units instead.
Behavior
Ambulas is a heavily armored and imposing bipedal proxy. It has a variety of abilities.
Offensively, it fires explosives that deal medium to high damage, as well as a rotating laser that deals high damage. Additionally, it can perform a high leap, which causes a Fire Blast at the point of impact. In close quarters, It will perform three stomps, each producing a shockwave, with the last being charged and doing significantly more damage. In addition to all of this, it has the ability to fire specialized shots into the air, which will land shortly after, producing an electric net with a radius of ~1.5m.
Defensively, it has moderate shields with a moderate recharge rate, though its recharge delay seems to vary at times. It has a fairly large health pool as well as Alloy armor, making standard/recommended Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. and Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. being less effective. Its Laser Slice attack (described below) also gives ambulas overshields, making it very difficult to damage it's shields during this stage.
Ambulas has unique taunts. Here is a list of them:
- "Incursion Probability: Negligent. Tenno Mortality Probability: Inevitable."
- "Offensive System Conclusion: Enemy Combustion."
Abilities
- Artillery Fire
- Instead of the usual short to medium-range shots Ambulas will hunker down and fire a succession of shots straight in the air which will strike from above.
- Triple Shock Wave
- Ambulas will charge up and stomp the ground, creating 3 Rippling Shockwaves in succession. The first 2 are normal, while the final one travels faster and covers more ground, almost similar to a Seismic Shockwave.
- Laser Slice
- Ambulas will charge up its laser cannon and fire a continuous orange laser beam while quickly rotating its turret, often times cutting circles around it. Its shields will go purple in this stage, apparently gaining a hefty amount of overshields on top of its current shield amount.
Strategy
As with all other bosses, kill all nearby mobs before engaging Ambulas. This being Pluto, the last thing you want is several high damage machine guns blasting you while being chased by the boss.
At the start of the battle, a timer (visible on the HUD) will start. At the end of this timer, a Condor Dropship will fly down to the battlefield and tractor any Ambulas units to itself before flying back to the large Corpus spacecraft in the background.
The goal of the boss battle is to damage the Ambulas unit enough to disable it, then hack it and defend it until the next dropship arrives. When the timer runs out, the dropship will then bring the allied Ambulas to the ship in the background, whether they're hacked or not. You must send four to six hacked Ambulas units (depending on squad size) back to the ship in order to win the battle.
If the dropship manages to retrieve an unhacked Ambulas unit, it will count as a failure. Three such failures will cause a complete mission failure, unless the dropship also carries a hacked Ambulas that will meet the quota.
Both the amount of hacked Ambulas units and amount of failures are shown on the HUD.
As its main health is Robotic and possesses Alloy Armor, it is weak to Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. and Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. damage, the latter moreso. However, it possesses immunity to Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. status.
Warframe abilities have different impacts to the battle:
- Volt's Electric Shield can block all of Ambulas' projectile attacks, essentially making the player untouchable for the shield's duration. Firing a crit-built weapon through the shield to double the total crit damage can take out Ambulas in just a few shots, even at higher levels. Alternatively, the player may stunlock Ambulas for a short time with Volt's Discharge, momentarily halting all surrounding attacks.
- Valkyr's Hysteria can also make short work of Ambulas due to its lack of special phases and a quite ineffective knockdown from Fire Blast.
- Nova's Molecular Prime can be a great help with Ambulas due to the fact that it slows and lets you or other players do more damage and making him easy to kill.
- Nyx's Mind Control is very useful. Mind controlling Ambulas allows you to freely shoot off its facemask, exposing its weak point to attack. Ambulas will also often focus attacks on mind controlled victims, allowing you to shoot Ambulas with little risk.
- Using Loki's Invisibility can make the battle very easy. After going invisible, Ambulas will generally stop chasing after you and stand in one spot, allowing the player to lay fire on it from a distance. Bringing a silenced, high powered weapon such as a bow combined with Loki's Invisibility can make short work of Ambulas.
- Irradiating Disarm also makes the reclamation teams easy to deal with as the repair Ospreys will commonly turn to fight their allies instead.
- Ivara's Prowl also works here, despite the speed reduction.
- Limbo’s Stasis has no effect on the Ambulas Unit, and the Electricity Net can still deal damage through the Rift.
- Ash's
Fatal Teleport has no effect on the Ambulas unit. - Mag's Magnetize can make the battle extremely easy. Magnetizing an Ambulas will cause any bullet you fire into the bubble to hit Ambulas no matter what. Bringing a high powered shotgun will do massive damage and end the battle within a matter of seconds. This just leaves you hacking and mob clearing afterwards.
- Saryn's Miasma (with a good strength/range build) may help with crowd control, allowing players to concentrate on disabling and protecting the Ambulas targets.
Some weapons may also prove to be a good match to Ambulas:
- Tigris Prime can deal massive damage with a Script error: The function "Proc" does not exist. build.
- Sniper rifles like the Rubico or the Lanka can deal massive damage if the shots fired land a critical hit at the right spot.
Trivia
- Ambulas was introduced Update 6.0 (2013-01-29), replacing the stock photo and name of Arn Etina in the process (as Arn Etina never had a physical model in-game). Prior to Update 20.4 (2017-05-04) Ambulas used an upscaled generic MOA model with a unique, all-black paint job.
- Although Ambulas had its own physical model, it still used the generic MOA model addressing the Tenno. Ambulas was also the only boss to be completely silent when it addressed the Tenno.
- Ambulas is currently the highest-leveled boss in the game, barring any boss used in Sorties.
- Ambulas means "you walk" in Latin, fitting the boss's depiction as an upgraded MOA Walker.
- After the introduction of Simulacrum, Ambulas was the only boss that could have been summoned there. This was fixed upon Hotfix 16.0.4 (2015-03-23). However, Ambulas can once again be summoned as of Update 20.4 (2017-05-04).
- For some reason, both Valkyr 's Hysteria and the Hirudo cannot life steal off of Ambulas.
Patch History
Update 23.8 (2018-09-12)
- Halved the amount of beacons required for the fight and granted after the fight.
Update 22.16 (2018-03-15)
- Fixed the hit boxes on Ambulas' two leg packs to disable when those parts are destroyed, stopping players from hitting it while shooting the empty space where those packs used to be.
Hotfix 22.8.3 (2018-01-11)
- Ambulas now possesses Trinity parts.
Update 22.8 (2017-12-21)
- Ambulas is now immune to Viral proc/status effect. This will fix issues where Ambulas becomes unhackable.
Update 21.0 (2017-06-29)
- Fixed multiple issues with transmissions during the Ambulas fight.
- Fixed Ambulas doing jump attacks in places where he obviously can’t perform this maneuver.
Hotfix 20.4.6 (2017-05-11)
- Fixed hacked Ambulas dropping Animo Beacons (that you don’t get to keep) in Captura.
Hotfix 20.4.4 (2017-05-08)
- Fixed floating Ambulas body parts during the boss fight.
Hotfix 20.4.3 (2017-05-05)
- Animo Beacons in the Ambulas boss fight on Hades are now End of Mission rewards in an even amount of 20, as opposed to hacked drops from the Ambulas boss. Please keep in mind that this change allows the Ambulas boss fight to follow suit with how other boss rewards are given.
Hotfix 20.4.2 (2017-05-05)
- Fixed damaged Ambulas armor pieces floating in the air after a Host migration.
- Fixed some sounds not playing properly for Clients during Ambulas boss fight.
