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Well, you got a reaction. Big as a house and half as smart. Knock it on the head, eh?
Konzu, talking about the Hemocyte
FOOLS!! You tried to POP its GLISTENING MAGNIFICENCE, but you just made it angry!
Vay Hek, also talking about the Hemocyte

The Hemocyte is a gigantic Infested creature that can be encountered during Operation: Plague Star. They only appear on the Advanced and The Steel Path variants of the Plague Star Bounty, with a total of four spawning during the final stage. They drop the Hunter Set Mods.

Tactics[]

  • The Hemocyte will spawn at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 99% progress. While the Hemocyte is alive, the Infested kill progress bar for that stage will be frozen.
  • Much like the visually similar Lephantis, the Hemocyte has three different heads, each of which will have different attacks they can use against players.
    • The Corpus head is a square head with green lighting, which will launch a wide barrage of infested spores that release clouds of toxic gas on impact.
    • The Grineer head has a long, triangular jaw with blue lighting, wielding a massive scythe that it uses to slash at enemies in close range.
    • The Ancient head has a long snout with orange lighting, and fires a swarm of homing projectiles that deal damage on impact and can knock players off their Archwings.
  • The only common attack available to the Hemocyte is an area-of-effect radial slam that can knock down players on the ground, visible as a yellow shockwave emanating from it.
  • The Hemocyte's outer skin is invulnerable to all weapons. However, each head will open up to reveal a weakspot whenever they launch an attack, with said weakspots being vulnerable to weapons fire and immune to all Status Effects. This includes immunity to armor-reducing status effects from Corrosive or Heat damage types, however the armor can still be reduced with armor-reducing mods. Like Lephantis, there is damage cap mechanic for every shot, meaning that shots that deal damage above a certain threshold will be significantly reduced by a percentage amount, and therefore high-damage slow-fire rate weapons (such as sniper or charge rifles) are less effective than fast-fire rate weapons (such as automatic assault rifles). Each head has its own health, and when killed the destroyed head is removed, along with any attacks it had. The Hemocyte is defeated when all 3 heads have been destroyed.
    • Frequently more than one head at a time will open to launch an attack. When this happens, wider AoE weapons have been seen hitting the weakpoints of multiple heads even when shot into the normally-invincible main body.

Damage Reduction[]

Each of Hemocyte's heads possesses an innate 70% DR.

Hemocyte also possesses Damage Reduction that scales depending on your weapon's damage. Damage is calculated by

Additionally, the damage is calculated using all health damage type modifiers, and is quantized. Critical hits have their damage doubled on top of the weapon's critical multiplier.

If a head is hit again within approximately 0.27 seconds, whether from multishot or simply firing again, the hit uses the following modifier instead:

In addition, each head possesses a damage cap. The cap is calculated for each damage instance, not the sum of hits.

Tips[]

  • Stay off the boil. It does significant 100% Shield-penetrating DmgToxinSmall64 Toxin quickly killing over time making it difficult to revive players who go into bleedout state while on the boil. A reliable method to rescue another player is going Void Mode while in Operator form.
    • The radius from the boil extends past the dome several meters so a player may also die standing next to the boil.
  • Archwings can be used to gain a height advantage over the Hemocyte, allowing players to avoid the majority of its attacks as well as prevent being swarmed by the Infested accompanying it. Players should be wary of the Hemocyte Ancient head's attacks however, as they are capable of tracking airborne targets and knocking players off their Archwings.
    • TitaniaIcon272 Titania's Razorwing130xWhite Razorwing is ideal for this, as Titania cannot be knocked out of Razorwing mode, and her plethora of crowd-control abilities can be used to keep the Infested at bay.
  • Abilities with slowdown effects, such as RhinoStomp130xWhite Rhino Stomp, MolecularPrime130xWhite Molecular Prime, SnowGlobe130xWhite Snow Globe, FocusTemporalDrag Temporal Drag or Warding Grace are a double-edged sword as while they can make attacking the Hemocyte's weak points easier, they also reduce the movement speed of the Infested between Hemocyte spawns (as well as the Hemocyte itself as it walks out of the boil) and can potentially drag out the fight, making any time gains from slowing the Hemocyte moot.
  • Warframe abilities that add distinct extra hits to your attacks instead of just a strength multiplier, such as Xata'sWhisper130xWhite Xata's Whisper or ToxicLash130xWhite Toxic Lash, are quite effective at helping get around the damage cap per hit.
  • SeekingTalons130xWhite Seeking Talons can help maintain DmgSlashSmall64 Slash procs on the Hemocyte heads.
  • While the Hemocyte is immune to status effects, its Infested Sinew can be reduced or removed by certain abilities or mods, even while it is invulnerable. See Armor Strip for sources of armor reduction. As for specific strategies:

Trivia[]

  • The Hemocyte is essentially a recolored Stage 2 Lephantis, with different lighting colors and slightly modified attacks. It is otherwise identical to the Lephantis in terms of tactics and weaknesses.
  • In Biology, Hemocytes are cells that form part of the immune system of invertebrates. They are part of the phagocyte group, responsible for consuming invading hostile cells or consuming and removing old or dead cells.

Patch History[]

Hotfix 30.7.4 (2021-09-14)

  • A side-out pickup UI notification will now appear when picking up a Relic dropped from the Hemocyte (similar to the Agon pickup UI notification).

Update 30.7 (2021-09-08)

  • Hemocyte is now immune to looting abilities that often didn’t fully work due to how quickly the body despawns (Hydroid's Tentacle Swarm with Pilfering Swarm, Nekros' Desecrate etc).
    • With the re-run of Plague Star, we are adding Nidus Prime’s Relics as in-world drops from the Hemocyte. This change was brought forth with this in mind, and the acquisition rate of this new Prime that could be influenced with loot abilities which is not a precedent we wish to set. With up to 4 Hemocytes that can spawn in the final stage it felt especially important to make this change.
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