The Ambulas Fight is Bad

I always seem to forget that Ambulas is a thing. It’s a boss fight located on Pluto, on a planet where very little normally happens. There’s no reason to go back to Pluto or Ambulas once you’ve done it. So the only time I end up fighting Ambulas is for Sorties.

Of course, the second I start these missions, I realize just how bad the Ambulas boss fight is.

It’s basically everything wrong with a boss fight.

When you imagine a boss fight, you imagine a big, scary enemy coming to attack you, which you then kill. Typically in a cataclysmic battle with some big lasers and explosions. Ambulas… kinda doesn’t do that.

The way Ambulas works is kinda lame actually. You fight an Ambulas, then it collapses into a heap. You have to then hack the console on its back and defend it until a timer runs out. During this time, repair drones will arrive to try and fix the Ambulas, and you have to kill them before they get too close. Once the timer runs down, the Ambulas is picked up and delivered back to the ship.

Sounds fine on paper, but when you have to do this 6 times, it makes for a very long, boring, drawn out battle. A battle with very little actual fighting in it, if you have any sort of crowd control. And even if you don’t have crowd control, you’re still just waiting to shoot down repair drones as they slowly approach.

If you are playing solo, you fight 5 Ambulas, one at a time and two at the end. In a squad, it’s always seven Ambulas, the first one on its own and the rest two at a time. No matter what though, once those Ambulas have been hacked, it’s waiting time.

Sorties just make it worse.

Okay, yeah, sure, Sorties are supposed to be harder. That’s the whole point of them. The hard part though is having inexperienced players, who don’t know the fight very well and don’t have the damage output to nuke the Ambulas. Ambulas is difficult if there’s Elemental Resistance modifiers, because Ambulas is only really weak to a handful of elements. There’s a hint of challenge, because of the timer.

But Sortie or otherwise, there is still a ton of waiting to be done. Unless you come in with all the wrong damage types and completely the wrong weapons, you can often take the Ambulas done, and you can still trivialize the defense part. Not even energy reduction can really stop a bunch of bored Tenno.

Somehow, even the orbital laser barrage doesn’t seem that scary. Mostly because you can just hide behind the conveniently-placed containers.

A great frame is locked away.

What makes matters EVEN worse is that Ambulas drops Trinity parts. And Trinity is a great support frame. The grind to getting her is so tedious though that it’s easy to give up, especially since the drop chances for her parts are random. There’s nothing worse than having to go get some more stupid tokens so you can have a crack at those Trinity systems that just won’t drop.

But originally, EXCALIBUR was the frame locked behind Ambulas. The fricking poster child Warframe was Ambulas’s drops. This pissed off a lot of people, so sacrifices had to be made. Trinity was that sacrifice, while Excalibur’s parts now drop on Mars.

I suppose there’s one good thing about the Ambulas fight. You get to watch Frohd Bek’s ship explode at the end. But after you’ve seen that for the second, third, or tenth time, it’s no longer that impressive. It’s made poorer by the fact that the extraction point is a really bad place to view the big explosion.

It should have been just the one Ambulas. But no, all we get is a massive snore-fest as we wait for a timer to tick down. Might as well play a Mobile Defense mission instead…