Beginner's Guide To WvW Roaming

Introduction

World vs World is one of the PvP gamemodes of GW2 and perhaps the area of the game where players have the most freedom to create their own gameplay loops, set their own goals. As a result a lot of new players are struggling to understand what to do in WvW. The goal of this guide is to explain one of the most common ways to play WvW: roaming.

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What's Roaming?

In short, roamers are WvW players who decided to play solo or band together in small groups to hunt down enemy players and take smaller objectives on their own instead of joining up with a commander and engaging in massive battles.

Objectives

Here's a couple of things you might do as a roamer:

• Killing supply dolyaks to cut off enemy supply lines.

• Taking out sentries.

• Capturing and defending supply camps.

• Engaging in smallscale PvP be it duels, outnumbered fights, or hunting down respawning enemies who are trying to make their way back to their zerg - just to mention a few.

• Lingering on the edge of larger battles and picking off stragglers and backline players.

• Taking over ruins found in the middle of all 3 home borderlands or shrines on Desert Borderlands.

WvW gives players the freedom to choose which aspect of roaming they want to focus on and to what degree. Some roamers are mostly interested in hanging around duel spots while others are all about flipping camps and going behind enemy lines. As long as you're maintaining participation you can do whatever you want. Keep an eye on WvW daily achievements too as dailies often encourage certain objectives and you're bound to find more PvP action around those.

Participation

If you've played WvW before you might be familiar with the participation system. Essentially there are 6 tiers of participation, every 5 minutes you earn WvW reward track progression based your participation level. Higher participation equals faster progression.

There's a countdown after which your participation starts decreasing if you're not engaging with any of WvW's main objectives. The maximum amount of time you can go without doing anything is 10 minuts, after which participation start decreasing.

How to inrease the participation timer in WvW:

The following activities reset the duration of the countdown timer to:

• 10 minutes - taking an objective with a territory marker (camp, tower or keep) OR killing an enemy player.

• 5 minutes - taking a sentry point, killing a Veteran Camp Supervisor, taking a shrine on Desert Borderlands, killing a Veteran creature with an event attached, taking a mercenary camp.

• 2 minutes - killing a supply dolyak or a guard NPC, taking a ruin in the middle of a borderland map.

Note: these values aren't additive, they only reset the timer to a set amount. Taking a sentry with 4 minutes left will set it to 5 minutes, not 9.