Festival of the Four Winds: two maps, no expansion

The summer festival always runs exactly three weeks, somewhere between mid July and mid September, and it is the largest of the six by surface area: two full maps, a dozen activities and a set of arenas that will teach you your class faster than any guide.

It needs no expansion. A brand-new account can walk in.

Getting there

Hot air balloons in Lion’s Arch and the major cities take you to Labyrinthine Cliffs.

The Crown Pavilion sits below western Divinity’s Reach and has its own waypoint and entry portal.

Labyrinthine Cliffs

A vertical map of cliffs, sails and floating platforms where the Zephyrites have landed. Movement here runs on special aspect skills, and half the map is built to be traversed rather than walked.

What lives there:

• Sanctum Sprint, a race on the aspect movement skills
• Aspect Arena, PvP using the same skills
• Crystal Collection, gathering crystals with aspects or mounts
• Griffon Expert and Master races, which need the griffon
• Time trials: Skimmer Slalom, Flying Dolyak, Labyrinthine Skiffs
• A fishing tournament (how fishing works)
• Merchants for the festival currencies

The Crown Pavilion

The other half, and the combat half.

Boss Blitz is the meta event: several champions across the arena, a crowd splitting to take them down, rewards for everyone who took part (how metas work).

Queen’s Gauntlet is the interesting one. Single combat, you against one boss, in a small arena. Optional gambits make each fight harder in a specific way in exchange for better rewards.

🔴 The Gauntlet is the best class trainer in the game and nobody advertises it that way. There is no group to carry you, no crowd to spread the damage, and no way to ignore a mechanic. If your rotation falls apart under pressure, you find out here in thirty seconds rather than over a wiped raid.

Everything you can do there

Two zones, and between them more distinct activities than most festivals manage.

Labyrinthine Cliffs is the vertical one. Mount and skiff races, a fishing tournament that pays Imperial Favor, griffon adventures, a crystal-collecting run and a long list of small secrets tucked into the rock faces.

The Crown Pavilion is the fighting one. The Queen’s Gauntlet puts you alone in a small arena against a series of bosses, Boss Blitz is a meta event against six of them at once, and the Pavilion Pursuit is a mount race through the whole structure.

Across both: Aspect Arena, which is competitive play with the Zephyrite aspects instead of your own skills, and Sanctum Sprint, a racing activity that has been quietly excellent since 2013.

🔴 A detail that matters if you are new: the festival rents you a mount for 10 silver if you do not own one. You can run the races without Path of Fire.

Currencies and rewards

Festival Tokens are the main currency, spent with the festival merchants.

Also flowing: Bags of Coins, Bags of Fish, Imperial Favor, adventure medals in gold, silver and bronze, and Astral Acclaim through Wizard’s Vault objectives (the vault).

Achievement categories include Four Winds Customs, the festival collections, and separate sets for the Crown Pavilion and the Gauntlet (why AP is worth having).

Where the easy rewards are

Boss Blitz. Show up, participate, get paid. No skill floor and no organisation required.

Adventures at bronze. Medals scale, and bronze is generous. Chasing gold on every adventure is a different hobby.

Wizard’s Vault objectives. Several of the current ones will point at the festival anyway, so you are being paid twice for the same evening.

What to do if you have one hour

Do Boss Blitz, take bronze on two or three adventures, buy whatever the merchant sells that you like the look of, and leave.

The festival returns next year with the same content. The collection that spans three seasons is meant to span three seasons. Treating a holiday as a backlog is the fastest way to stop enjoying it.

The one festival that is about moving.

The festival returned as an annual event on 23 July 2018 and has run every late summer since, for roughly three to four weeks.

What sets it apart is what it asks you to do. Halloween is about a labyrinth farm. Wintersday is about a jumping puzzle and a gift grind. Four Winds is almost entirely about movement: climbing wind currents, racing beetles and skiffs, sprinting a sanctum, throwing yourself off a cliff and catching an updraft.

Labyrinthine Cliffs has no waypoints in the ordinary sense. You get around it by using the aspects the Zephyrites left behind, and for a first-time visitor the map is confusing in a way modern zones never are.

Give it twenty minutes and something clicks. You stop looking for a path and start reading the air currents, and then the whole map opens up at once. It is one of the few places in Guild Wars 2 that still teaches you something, and it comes back for a month every summer to do it again.

One note on the market

Festival currencies and materials are cheapest while the festival is running, because thousands of people are farming the same things at once and selling them the same week (the pattern).

If there is a festival skin or material you want, this is the month. Eleven months from now the supply will have stopped and the price will not have (how fees affect the maths).