Introduction to Speedclears

An introduction to end-game content and speed-clearing.
Guild wars has five end-game areas – The Deep, Urgoz’ warren (Urgoz), the Domain of Anguish (DoA), the Fissure of Woe (FoW) and the Underworld (UW). For many players these areas present a challenge and methods have developed to complete these areas as fast as possible, whether for fun or for the rewards from the chest. These methods are known as speed-clears, for obvious reasons, and are widely regarded to be the most challenging thing to do in PvE. Speed-clear tactics are based on a few basic principles:

-It is generally faster to avoid foes than to kill them.

-It takes less time to group foes together and then kill them all using AoE damage than it does to kill them individually.

-It is quicker to split up and complete multiple objectives at once than it is to do each objective in turn.

These principles can be seen in all of the speed clears – in FoW and UW “terras” split off to complete objectives on their own while a smaller team does things that the terras can’t do using a tank to ball things up and AoE damage to kill them. In DoA and Urgoz, groups can be ignored using tanks with recall who can pull enemies away from the team and recall back to the team when they are safe.


Principles and techniques used in speed-clearing
Balling
Balling is the act of running around in such a way that a group of foes will be forced to stand very near each other in a “ball”, this is used in speed-clears to make AoE damage more effective by increasing the number of targets hit. In most situations the balling is done by dedicated “tanks” who carry skills on their bar that make them more resilient and so able to withstand foes attacks while they ball them up. There are a few specific techniques used to ball foes:

Free-balling
Is when foes are balled in empty space, with no features employed to help ball them, this is often used with groups that are mainly melee or mainly casters and using walls isn’t necessary, and also with groups that are not near any usable features.

Using Features
A large number of balls in areas where only one tank is used like UW and FoW are done using this method, the principle is to use a wall to make baling foes easier and faster, and to make the resulting ball tighter. Forcing the foes to run around a corner to stay in range of you is how this is done most of the time, this means that all of the foes take the shortest route possible to get to you, meaning that they clump together on the corner that you force them to run around, when this is done it is common to run back to the casters in order to bring the melee foes onto the casters and create one tight ball.

The Pull Through
This technique is commonly employed in areas with more than one tank (DoA, Deep, Urgoz) and usually involves one tank pulling a large number of foes, melee and caster, “through” the other tank, who will be standing just off a wall. This means that the foes get “stuck” between the tank and the wall, so they cannot follow their target (the first tank), and if the first tank keeps running then the casters that are attacking him will also run in and get stuck on the first tank, this method is not often used in the “puggable” speed-clears but is very common in more specialised areas like DoA and Urgoz. Pull through’s can be a little hit and miss, in that if the casters immediately retarget and begin attacking the stationary tank then they will not run in and ball correctly. One technique to improve the efficiency of pull-throughs is for the monk to heal the tank who is running through, leading to the monk (who has less health and lower armor) being targeted by the casters of the group, meaning they ignore the stationary tank and ball up in an attempt to attack the monk.

Balling ranged foes with different ranges
Some foes have longer ranges than others, rangers attack from a long distance whereas paragons attack from a very short distance, but there is a way to ball all of these foes together. The idea is based on balling one of the ranges each time and running back and forth for each range, assuming that the ball contains rangers, casters and paragons, the solution would be to string them out in a line with the rangers where you want the final ball to be, then run to the other side of the ball until the casters were balled on top of the rangers, then run back the other way until the paragons were balled on the casters and the rangers. This method can be repeated as many times as necessary, however be aware that it can often be more efficient to simply ball the foes quickly and kill anything that isn’t balled with Edge of Extinction.

“Disconnected” foes
Disconnected foes are most commonly encountered when melee foes break off from a group due to health loss, they run out and stay just in range, but do not do anything until they have healed up. However there are a few places where foes are automatically disconnected, and these foes present a particular challenge when balling groups together, there are a few approaches to balling these foes:
1) Don’t bother, ball the rest of the groups and then deal with the disconnected foes later.
The other 2 ways require a bit of knowledge about how these foes move. The key thing to remember is that they stay on the edge of your aggro bubble, and that they run clockwise around your bubble in order to stay in range.
2) Try and free ball them – it is possible to free ball these foes by running to the right of where you want the foes to end up, if you run in exactly the right direction then you will cause the foes to run clockwise around your bubble right into the other foes in the group, however be aware that as soon as they retarget onto someone else they will move to a new position, so a fast spike is necessary.
3) Use a wall. When they are running clockwise, if they encounter a wall they will run along it until they are at the end of your aggro bubble again, this means that by moving along a wall you can “block” these foes between you and the wall. By using corners on the wall to block any ranged foes in the group it is possible to ball melee, ranged and disconnected foes together in the same place, however it can be time consuming to do it right and takes practice.