Guild Wars 2

I’ve been trying to figure out the mechanics of contesting, particularly as a roamer, and am seeing some pretty inconsistent things. At SM for instance, it took a good minute of banging on the gate to throw it into contested, while the water entrance of the SE keep in EB it took a single berserker phantasm which makes me question the damage threshold. Or perhaps the damage threshold is damage over the number of people in the vicinity.

Any ideas on the mechanics here?

All you need to do it hit the door once. It takes 30s for the white swords on the keep icon to pop up but the WP is instantly contested. As far as I know there isn’t a amount of damage you need to do, just do damage.

For extra credit, have people tap ALL of the keep and tower doors on an entire map simultaneously, wait 30 seconds, take all camps simultaneously.

No group is organized enough to counter that strategy, and even once they realize that the door taps WERE a distraction, they will start wondering which tower/keep you are actually going to focus on, and let the camps go.

Tapping seems like a pretty potent strategy in general. Tagging something like bay or hill bl on an off over a few hours can set up a pretty good rush. Boy that cried wolf.