Before official forum gets closed I thought I could give you a guide to WvW written by dev Mike Ferguson.

Mike Ferguson

WvW Guide

Did you just get into the game and are super excited to try world versus world? Maybe you’ve heard about it and want to know more before diving in? Tried it out and ended up so confused your brain was spinning?

Well that’s why this post is here! I’m going to try and cover some of the basics of how WvW works and give you a couple tips to get started. It should help anyone who hasn’t experienced large scale combat like this before start to understand it a little better.

I’m also hoping this will help shorten the time that people experience adventures that can be painful or confusing when first starting out in WvW and help lead them into some incredibly fun experiences that might just leave people wondering how the last 6 hours went by so fast.

World versus world has a lot of different mechanics and can appear to be fairly intimidating to learn and hard to understand at first, but you don’t need to know everything to enjoy the game.

All you really need to know is this: take the other teams objectives, don’t let them take yours.

Please note that I’ll likely be updating this over the weekend to add any other additional useful tips that I didn’t cover originally. Feel free to mention your own tips!

How do you get to world versus world?

Pretty simple, just open the WvW Scoreboard (default:B) and click the black button that says ‘Go to World versus World’, select a map and off you go.

You might get asked if you want to enter the queue for that map (particularly if you selected Eternal Battlegrounds). If you enter a queue, you can try to enter another map to play in while you wait. If you try to enter another map that is full and choose to enter the queue for the new map, you will be removed from the queue for the old map. Choosing to not enter the queue in the new map will leave you in the queue for the old map.

You can also visit Fort Marriner in Lion’s Arch and enter world versus world and the heart of the mists from the asura gates located there.

OK, I’m here, now what?

Talk to the instructor and ask them some questions (by some, I mean all of them). They have quite a bit of useful information that you should know before heading out to the battlefields. We still need to add more topics, but they’ll give you a good head start for now.

You’ll definitely want to meet up with some allies. Running around on your own is just going to get you killed unless you really know what you’re doing. Ask where people need help. If nobody is talking, open your map and look for orange crossed swords or white crossed swords. Orange swords are where more than 6 people are fighting. White crossed swords indicate an objective that is under attack.

If you see white swords around an objective that your team owns, that’s a good place to help out and you’ll likely run into allies defending there as well. Try to get inside the objective first, then figure out a plan to engage the enemy! Just head towards the glowing portals next to the doors to enter the tower or keep.

Orange swords are much riskier if you are alone, but can also be worth checking out if they are close to an objective your team owns.

Great, everything on the map is red blue or green, how do I know what team color I am on?

Open the WvW Scoreboard, and look for your world name in a box at the top. The background of that panel is your home color. If you don’t remember which world you are on, your world will have a little house icon to the left of it’s name. There are also flags all around your starting areas with your team color.

These doors take forever to break down!

Are you using siege weapons? A flame ram makes quick work of basic doors, you may want 2 or 3 for a reinforced door. Catapults, ballista, and trebuchets can help make short work of walls and gates too.

Blueprints are so expensive!

Once you level up a bit blueprint costs will start to be negligible, but costs will feel a bit more prohibitive when starting out.

You can get some free blueprints from treasure chests that are available in each map. The chests resest every 24 hours and require you to traverse some rather devious jumping puzzles to reach them. Enemy guards and dolyaks have been known to drop blueprints from time to time as well.

What’s all this talk about supply?

Supply is a resource unique to world versus world. You can use it to build siege weapons or repair damaged walls and gates. Simply walk up close to any siege site or damaged structure while you are carrying supply and press your interact key, you’ll then use whatever supply you are carrying on that object.

Supply can be picked up from any supply depot (as long as there is supply in the depot to begin with). There are depots at every objective, and some even have more than one.

You should always be carrying supply whenever you can. Try to make it a habit of grabbing some whenever you take a camp. You never know when you might need a quickly built ballista or arrow cart to help turn a fight.

Supply is generated at every resource camp, so you can pretty much count on always finding some at any camp you own. Supply must be carried by dolyaks to other objectives though. Guard your caravans because you’ll need supply at towers and keeps to be able to upgrade them

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How do you upgrade objectives?

Talk to any quartermaster and ask them about upgrades. You can purchase a number of different upgrades for each objective. You’ll need to have supply in the depot of the objective to complete each upgrade.

Personnel upgrades must have all the supply paid up front, while structural upgrades can be purchased without all the required supply in the depot, NPC workers will just grab supply as it comes in from dolyaks.

How did someone get their guild emblem on the flags?

Guilds can claim one objective in world versus world. Speak with the Lord or Supervisor of that location to claim a location. If you do not have to correct permissions from your guild, you cannot claim a location. Guild can place buffs around objectives they own with guild upgrades (available in the guild panel).

What level should I be?

You can go to World versus world at any level, but I’d recommend that new players learn all the skills from a weapon set or two and possibly even unlock weapon swapping before joining so they have a bit more experience with the game and understand how combat operates a little better before jumping in. It’s certainly possible to level all the way to 80 through WvW, but I wouldn’t really recommend it for brand new players as the first couple levels can be pretty rough until you unlock some skills on a couple of weapons. It can be a fun challenge for some people, but definitely not for everybody.

Why are there so few waypoints?

Travel times are a critical piece of making WvW work. If waypoints are more common, it becomes more difficult to put players out of a fight for any significant amount of time after they are defeated, and it soon gets to a point where attackers just need to keep throwing bodies at something long enough to overwhelm the defenders.

As players begin to have more money on hand to spend on upgrades, we’ll start seeing waypoint upgrades being purchased more frequently at keeps. That will help cut down on travel back to locations you own, but we won’t be adding waypoints to other locations.

If you want to reduce your travel times, there are ways you can do so. One of the best ways to reduce your travel time in WvW is to learn ways to not die as often so you don’t have to keep making the run back from the portal keep to where the fighting is. Bring skills that give you swiftness and cripple or otherwise inhibit the enemy, travel with friends so you can fight off small pockets of resistance, fight close to defenses so you have an escape route to safety nearby, and perhaps most importantly, learn when to dodge and when to run away. Well timed dodges can and will save your life thus making your great escapes possible.

Try to avoid fights you will clearly lose when you can retreat and regroup nearby. You might even be able to get just a couple people to break off and turn it into a fight you can win.

I heard you could recruit NPCs?

You heard right! Each map has mercenary factions that will assist teams that come to the aid of that faction. The eternal battlegrounds has three such camps (dredge, ogre, and hylek) and each borderlands map has a quaggan camp in the lake they can befriend.

Once a team helps one of these factions enough, then they will start to assist that team in various ways. The camps in the Battlegrounds will begin sending NPCs out to the nearby areas to assist their friends. The Quaggan camps summon storms over the nearby keeps as long as the nearby weather generator is functional. These storms will summon healing rains for allies and zap enemies with lighting.

These camps can be great places for solo players to help out and get some extra experience and loot by converting neutral camps to their side.

How do I get better gear?

Players and monsters have a chance of dropping gear. Whenever you get XP for a kill, you also have a chance of getting a loot drop. All loot drops in wvw are tailored for your current level.

There are also a wide variety of coin and karma merchants in each portal keep that have gear for sale. You can also use badges of honor to buy gear, but that is all intended for higher level folks.

Crafting is also an option, as each borderlands map has all the lower level resource nodes you could want. Grab some gathering tools and you can make your own gear!

There is also a Black Lion Trader in each portal keep, check the trading post and you might find a good deal there.

These jerks are camping our base, we can’t get out!

Every starting area has three ways out of it, the main central path and two side paths. If someone is camping your gate, don’t keep running straight into them, run around them and take their stuff while they sit there!

Anything else?

Go. Fight. Win.