Running Guild Wars at the same time as a World Event is the height of stupidity – for all levels of player.
I’m going to use Maths to prove it.
TL;DR
Guild Wars and a World Event take roughly the same amount of time for all levels of player, so running both together is double the amount of play!
Intro
Guild Wars consists of 30 difficult battles for pretty much every player. Yes, they can be done quickly for those who don’t take GW all that seriously, but they’re still not going to be speed battles.
World Events give you 28 Sigils as a starting point. Valravens will generally increase this by about 50%, up to 42 battles. At least half those battles are going to be very easy, even for beginning players. Eventually, the battles start taking longer, and then they become hard enough to expend multiple Sigils per battle.
Early-Game Player
A Guild Wars battle is likely to take about 2-3 minutes, plus time building defence and offence teams (though most early-game players are unlikely to tweak them every GW).
It’s fair to say GW will take at least an hour of solid play for the week.
For a World Event, the going is likely to be really tough, even just to do the base Sigils. An early-game player is unlikely to buy many extra Sigils, and could well lose Valravens. Building teams based on such limited troop choices is a real headache. For example, my level 700 alt can only get to around the 10th floor of Tower of Doom – no more than 50 battles, and the second half always with 2 or 3 Sigils per battle. (Sorry that I don’t have a World Event example; it would take a long time for me to find the screenshots, if I even have them.)
Assuming you get lucky with the team (ie: having the right troops and having them levelled to 18-19), the first three tiers of battles (15 Sigils, prior to the current event) are going to take around a minute each. Perhaps the next 15 might take about 2-3 minutes each. And the next 15 might need 2 Sigils each, also taking 2-3 minutes each. That’s 60 Sigils, though, so probably includes spending some Gems.
My estimate is 15 * (1 + 2 + 3) = 1.5 hours. (Less, if not buying Sigils.)
Mid-Game Player
This is where we see the most variation in times. We can assume any needed troops except Mythics are available and can be maxed, even if they’re not, yet. That may not be the case for weapons, which could hurt in the World Event.
Guild Wars is likely to take 2-3 minutes per battle, or more if the player/guild is GW-focussed.
So let’s say, about 1.5 hours for Guild Wars.
For the World Event, we can assume players will buy Tier III (as this is the usual sweet-spot). That’s a total of 9 additional Sigils: (28 + 9) * 1.5 = 55 Battles.
The first 30 battles are likely to take under a minute, then let’s say 2-3 minutes for the remaining 25.
That’s roughly 1.5 hours for the World Event.
Late-Game Player
While not everyone bothers with Guild Wars in late-game, those who take it very seriously can take 10 minutes or more per match! My Guild has won GW a couple of times (and I would have been Paragon this week, if not for one dumb mistake while Frozen 
). Pretty much every GW battle takes at least 5 minutes. Anything under 3 minutes per battle is very unlikely in end-game, even if you take it casually.
An end-game player will reasonably spend between 1.5 and 2.5 hours on GW.
I did the first 24 battles of the current World Event in just under 20 minutes today. I certainly expect they’ll get harder, but with maxed access to any valid team for the event, I doubt the battles will get much longer than 2-3 minutes. I did buy Tier III, so we can assume 1m each for the first 30 battles and 2m each for the final 25.
I’m expecting to spend about 1.5h on the World Event.
Leaderboards
You can’t buy a GW leaderboard – even with the Elite+ Pass, you still have to play the battles carefully. So if you want to be at the top, you can easily spend 5 hours or more on Guild Wars throughout the week, plus more time tweaking your teams every single time.
You can buy a World Event leaderboard position. If you look at the new Faction leaderboards, some people must be spending 50,000 Gems to get near the top. I think that may be more Gems than I’ve owned throughout 2 years in this game. Yet even in a World Event, you have to play the Sigils.
Assume you buy 20 times Tier VII. That gives you (28 + 28 + 20* 20) * 1.5 = 984 Battles! Even if you do them at 30 seconds each, that is more than 8 hours of playing the World Event!
Summary
| Guild Wars | World Event | |
|---|---|---|
| Early-Game | 1 hour | 1.5 hours |
| Mid-Game | 1.5 hours | 1.5 hours |
| Late-Game | 2 hours | 1.5 hours |
| Leaderboard | 5 hours | 6 hours |
Conclusion
Running Guild Wars and the World Event at the same time doubles the amount of play time required during the week. Therefore, it’s a really dumb idea!
