How much time does ArenaNet expect us to spend on Festival Activities in a week? This year’s main incentive are probably the additional Sun-Grown Weapon (Skins).
I finished (Annual) For Winds Customs for the first skin at around 100/200 of the weekly progress after about 4 days of doing little more than completing the festival dailies. From there on it gets pretty tedious to get more skins, but you can only get 1 annual + 3 (or 4, ouch!) weekly chests anyway this year. Then why make it so time-consuming (and boring) to get them?
I’m going to get a few (probably 3, e. g. Longbow, Greatsword and Hammer) for my Ranger to complement the look of his Back item.
So, how many skins are you planning to get this year?
Funnily enough, compared to Dragonbash the Four Winds weekly is really easy for me. I do quick dailies plus a the Time Trials skimmer, baby dolyak, griffon + Pavilion. The trials all in all take like five minutes. Edit: and if there is a Blitz going on, I take that as well. Free loot.
I thought Griffon Adventures do not count for the weekly?
Anyway, without Blitz you’ll need to complete 200 / 3 = 67 activities per week or rather 9.5 (11) Time Trials per day, if you actually do this every day (first festival week not even has 6 full days). Or to put it differently: 3 Time Trials (3 points each) + 1 Blitz (10 points) per day only gets you to 133 points in 7 days (154, if you also do the Skiff Trial).
The Dragonbash Time Trail (Roller Beetle) grants 5 points and the Dragon Arena (which you can do whenever you want) grants 5 points per boss = 25 points for a full clear. So I would argue that this weekly is a lot faster and less tedious, e. g. 1 Time Trial (5 points) + 1 Full Dragon Arena (25 points) per day gets you to 210 points in 7 days.
I think the fastest way to get to 200 points at the current festival is to find an empty Queen’s Gauntlet Ring and beat an easy opponent (10 seconds) over and over again for 3 points each. (And don’t do this on a Mechanist, since your Mech will despawn at the end of each fight.)
With Dragonbash, at the end of the week full of three dailes per day I still had 100 points left to grind. With Four Winds, I’m at ~50 points at day 2 and all I do are a few dailies and the Time Trials. It’s not even a competition. Maybe the annual achievements give extra points?
Edit: Just finished an Annual, got a few additional points. So it might be that.
This is weird (the additional points from Annuals, I mean).
… which meant I needed to get 100 more points in the remaining 2 days of the first (shorter) week. And this was a surprise to me, since I was actually expecting to be on track for the weekly when doing a bit more than the dailies every day.