You're Trapped In Here With Me

I needed a few more ambushes to "farm". For me the best way was trying to get in and out of combat often. Every 15-20 combats was an ambush on nightmare, I was just grinding whatever mob I saw. This was way more consistent than trying to getting ambushed at traps.

This is one of the last achievements I need for Preying for Midnight, so I wanted a way to maximize the amount of ambushes I got per hunt, but I couldn't find any information on how ambushes actually work, so I did my own testing and wrote down the data.

All of these hunts were Normal difficulty. I would've checked the higher ones, but I used up all my Hard and Nightmare hunts for the week before I started experimenting. If I get around to trying my method on Hard and Nightmare next week or on an alt, I'll try to update this post to reflect that.

As far as I've found, ambushes themselves are on a cooldown that's something like 5 minutes and 30 seconds long. Prey will only spawn while you are in combat, and actively attacking an enemy (presumably to protect AFK players from getting ambushed), auto attacks do work for this. It took approximately 10 seconds in combat for my prey to actually spawn and ambush me.

In between every ambush, I sat mounted in a safe place, started the in-game stopwatch, and sat there, waiting out the timer. Once 5min 30sec had passed, I'd fly down, start fighting something, and my prey would pretty quickly spawn to ambush me. I also did some experiments to see if amount of kills or amount of fights did anything to increase spawn rate, but it didn't seem to make any difference, my prey would only spawn after 5min 30sec.

The most amount of ambushes I could get in a single hunt was 6, though keep in mind I was also picking up the Remnant of Anguish left behind after defeating an ambush, and that does give you hunt progress. When I was still doing ripostes for I Didn't Hear No Bell and picking up remnants, the most ambushes I got was 4, so your mileage will vary depending on what you're doing.

I hope this can help someone. If you've got your own data/findings on ambush spawning mechanics, I would sincerely love to hear them.