Guild Wars 2

I haven’t seen a place where strategy discussion about guild missions are taking place.

I would like to ask others about good strategies to find and defeat Yanonka the Rat Wrangler.

Our guild drew this bounty 3 times in a row last night and failed to complete it (partly because we had other difficult ones like Sotzz, Prisoner 1411 or 2-Mult). But for this bounty specifically we had a rough time finding it.

About 40 people participating in the bounty, all on voice chat with lots of coordination. For tier 3 we split into 3 groups, meaning 2 bounties/group.

We had 6-8 people looking for Yanonka and it was only found once. However the boss quickly wiped the guildie who found the correct rat and then disappeared. We couldn’t find it again after that in the 8 min left.

In our defense, we didn’t know anything about the spawn mechanics of this boss, so the first 2 bounty missions failed because we were figuring out what and where to search. The third time we thought we had it covered but we still failed.

Would like to hear how others got this boss done, to learn more about it.

PS: please don’t turn this into a complaint/insult thread. I’d like to keep it constructive to work out a good strategy for this boss.

EDIT: changed thread title to better represent the content

No tips at all? Anyone done this boss? Was it just luck?

I been wondering what all dem Suspicious rats I’ve been seeing ebonhawke were…

This boss, along with Sotzz and the hylek in a tree, are nightmares because you cannot properly pre-scout them. If you find them, they respawn in such a short time period that it’s no good. The best advice I can give is to activate them as soon as you find them, inform your guild, and kite the boss until reinforcements arrive. Regardless, you’re likely to fail any T3 bounty including any of these three targets unless you get extraordinarily lucky.

I recommend using single target damage, no AOE.

When you kill the rats in the cross fire, bad things happen!

Also to repeat some above advice, activate as soon as you can, first person to find it will probably die though.

Thanks for the reply.
Here are my questions:

1. Can you identify which ‘suspicious rat’ is the boss before the bounty is started?
(from what we’ve seen, the rats can only be ‘attacked’ when the bounty timer is on, so I personally don’t think you can check which of the ~20? rats is the good one, aka. pre-scout)

2. If the boss kills the person who found it, does it always immediately disappear from that location?

3. If above is true, do all the rats re-spawn randomly at that time?

4. If point 2 is true, is the bounty failed right there?

5. When the boss is activated, does it have a map-marker visible to everyone on that map, like other bounties do?

Let’s get the ideas flowing.

Silver Chopper.4506:

1. Can you identify which ‘suspicious rat’ is the boss before the bounty is started?
(from what we’ve seen, the rats can only be ‘attacked’ when the bounty timer is on, so I personally don’t think you can check which of the ~20? rats is the good one, aka. pre-scout)

You cannot pre-scout Yanonka or Big Mayana, no. You can currently pre-scout Sotzz, but he disappears after 1m so it’s not worth it. Anthony Orden has confirmed that he will make Sotzz like Yanonka for a future release.

Silver Chopper.4506:

2. If the boss kills the person who found it, does it always immediately disappear from that location?

The boss will ‘escape’ if it ‘resets’, which requires no enemies for it to target. This means if you die as the only player engaging it, she will reset and thus escape.

Silver Chopper.4506:

3. If above is true, do all the rats re-spawn randomly at that time?

The rats respawn as soon as she escapes.

Silver Chopper.4506:

4. If point 2 is true, is the bounty failed right there?

No. You can find her again and complete her, though you have now wasted precious time.

Silver Chopper.4506:

5. When the boss is activated, does it have a map-marker visible to everyone on that map, like other bounties do?

The map-marker only shows if you’re within some range of the bounty just like a normal dynamic event. It will not show up across the entire map. Use a commander tag to achieve this so you can rally your guild-mates to you (this is what I do).

Basically how Yanonka works is like this:
Suspicious rats are located around the map. The rats always spawn in relatively the same location like Sotzz’s barrels. You cannot interact with the rats before a bounty is started.

Once the bounty is started, you can begin talking to the rats and see if they are correct rat. They will bite you and then run away. The correct rat will do the same, but Yanonka will spawn right there.

Do not engage Yanonka unless she engages you first. If you do not engage her, she will just stand there and wait around for awhile. During this time, get your party over there ASAP. If she does engage you, you are going to have to kite which is incredible difficult due to her mechanics.

Yanonka herself is a thief. Her main attack is the thief “steal” attack where she will blink around and hit you for a ton of damage. Fortunately, it has a large telegraph so you can see it coming and evade appropriately. Unfortunately, she will do it 3-4 times in a row, in which you do not have enough dodges usually to evade all of them. The pet rats she spawns will not be hostile until attacked so it is important not to use AoE and instead try to focus her with single target abilities.

If you fail and your party wipes or runs out of time, the rats will respawn around the map and she will be located again in a random location.

In terms of limiting the RNG to find her, there really is no true method. It pretty much involves knowing where the rats usually are at and then getting luckily.

Here’s my tip: If you draw Yanonka, write the bounty off as a loss. Then hope Arenanet gets rid of the guy who thought bounties were a great, fun thing to put into Guild Wars 2 in their current incarnation and puts the SAB team in charge of it instead.

@ Rising Dusk & Diviner – Cheers to you two fellows. This stuff is helpful for a lot of guilds out there.

@ Vargs – If that happens, I envision a future where you’d have to do a jumping puzzle ‘a la’ Mad King Tower to get to a bounty boss. All within a strict time limit. Fun for some, agony for others. It’s dicey.

Silver Chopper.4506:

@ Vargs – If that happens, I envision a future where you’d have to do a jumping puzzle ‘a la’ Mad King Tower to get to a bounty boss. All within a strict time limit. Fun for some, agony for others. It’s dicey.

I would vastly, vastly prefer that over some RNG nonsense stacked against you.

1.Those rats stacks 10 stacks of bleed in no time which means u need area condie remover
2.Yanonka teleports means u just ranged her, meleeing her seems to pull aggro from many rats means ur suiciding in melee if not tank geared
3. 2-3 Battle Standard fixes all ur problem

Yeah, we have gotten the rat-wrangler 3 times in a row our T3 bounty. We’ve failed every time because of it. We get at least 40 people in the map searching for yanonka with at least 7-9 minutes left in the bounty and still have yet to be able to finish in time. We have a large guild that would finish T3 no problem before the added bounties, can’t imagine how these new bounties are gonna effect even smaller guilds.

We got Yanonka to half health and then he reset to 80% health in place even though there was still 4 of us next to him…

And after that he kept resetting from 80% to 100%… Made it completely impossible.

Please fix him ANet…