Info The Elemental Revamp: Part 1 - Endgame Overhaul - Updated Changelog Beta 1.1.1

So is there any timeframe for the next version of beta by chance?

 

Thoughts on EWF vs. TWA, with regard to how the characteristics of these archetypes may influence the strength of certain weapons

I'll refer to my Raw Spell Analysis and Big List of Beta Builds as needed, since both were what opened my eyes to the nature of this issue.

Introduction

As described in the OP, EWF and TWA are as follows:

(I have issues with the descriptions as they relate to the qualities of the archetypes, but those are minor - e.g. the use of "low survivability" for TWA when what is actually meant is likely "you'll probably get twoshot if Agi doesn't proc")

Both archetypes are spell-oriented with one offensive element and one defensive elements. Theoretically, this means they should be more easily comparable than other combinations of archetypes. There are limits to this sort of thing (see EFA vs. TFA) but it's a useful heuristic.

If we look at Wynndata, we can see that TWA damage items have a focus on raw spell, while EWF damage items have a focus on spell/elemental percent boosts. Consider this list of the 15 highest raw spell items in the game:

Spoiler: List of items

The Crossing (ETW)
Brainwash (ETW)
Slayer (TWA)
Tesla (TWF)
Dark Shroud (TWA)
Soul Signal (TWA)
Sparkling Plate (TWA)
Ventus Tail (TWA)
Aries (EWA)
The Queen's Headpiece (TWA)
Unravel (TWA)
Whitecap Crown (TWA)
Crestfallen (EWA)
Quartzite Helm (TWA)
Sizzling Shawl (TWF)

There are 2 ETW items (the highest on this list), 2 TWF items, 2 EWA items, and 9 TWA items. Although a couple of these can be used in EWF situationally (namely Crestfallen and Sizzling Shawl), you have to go down to Memento before finding an EWF-oriented raw spell item - which happens to conflict with Gaea-Hewn Boots anyway. Even if you cross archetypes, your best raw spell options for EWF are Sizzling Shawl, Vacuum, Crestfallen, and Memento. Even supposing you can use all of these, and get past Sizzling Shawl's mana regen and health regen penalties, you'll have significantly less raw spell than TWA.

Of course this is not necessarily a problem, but as I'll show below it has had some adverse effects on the current Beta.

Varying effects of raw spell

It's well-known that raw spell is generally more effective on mage, and generally less effective on archer. In fact, the raw spell analysis that I performed recently (see the link at the top) was part of the reason for this post.

Consider a typical EWF build and a typical TWA build. I chose water weapons for both, for consistency.

EWF: 299%, 120 raw spell
TWA: 166%, 982 raw spell

Now let's convert the raw spells to percent equivalents across a variety of base damages:

We can see a clear pattern - for weapons with low base damages (to be precise, base damage times the attack speed multiplier), the TWA build is more powerful, while the opposite is true for weapons with high base damages. For some points of comparison, along the x-axis Gale's Force would be at 995, while Morrowind would be at 478.

Though useful for illustrative purposes, I don't think the builds above are exactly comparable - the EWF build has unusually low health, trading that in for extra damage. I think a more accurate point where EWF and TWA yield the same benefits is at around 800-1000 on the x-axis. (But, that's not particularly important right now.)

If you look at the list of builds I linked at the top of the post, or otherwise just spend a bunch of time building, you'll notice that EWF Mage builds tend to be relatively weak compared to TWA Mage builds. Correspondingly, if you dive into the realm of Archer, Assassin, and Warrior mythics, you'll notice EWF builds tend to be stronger than TWA builds. You can see that this is compensated for somewhat in the base damages (Gale's Force is slightly above Hellstrand in damage, while Morrowind is far below Peaceful Rest) - however I would argue that the compensation isn't strong enough on the extremes (Mage nonmythics, and Archer/Assassin mythics). You can see this with the strength of weapons like Spring, Ignis, and Idol compared to Stratiformis and Weathered, and correspondingly with the relative weakness of weapons like Overgrown compared to, say, Predposledni.

Proposed solutions
In my opinion, at least one of these needs to happen to balance the meta. I could see both of them happening to a lesser extent instead, though.

1. Add raw spell to EWF, at the expense of existing percent damages - For example, nerfing Aphotic's percent damages but adding comparable raw spell. This would bring EWF to a competitive level for Mages, and would decrease the power of high base weapons like Spring. Although, this would compromise the identities of EWF and TWA with respect to raw spell.
2. Compensate for the archetype difference by modifying base damages - Buffing the damage of low base damage EWF-oriented weapons like Overgrown, Charging Flame, etc. and nerfing the damage of high base damage EWF-oriented weapons like Spring, Ignis, Idol, etc. The other way is possible (nerfing low-damage TWA weapons and buffing high-damage TWA weapons) but in my opinion harder to manage in later balancing since it spreads out base damages so much.

 

The general message behind this post is fine, but I'm a little skeptical about your damage calculations in that graph.
WynnData has an annoying habit of displaying damage% bonuses without the "+" symbol you would see in the actual game. So really, shouldn't the damage increase for EWF and TWA be labeled as +299% and +166% respectively?

That "+" symbol means that damage increase is being added to something. Would that "something" not be the base spell damage of a weapon?
Let's assume that the base spell damage of a weapon (base damage times attack speed spell multiplier) is 100% of its unmodified damage.
EWF: 100% base damage +299% damage increase = 399% total damage
TWA: 100% base damage +166% damage increase = 266% total damage

And if we convert those multipliers to decimal values for a slope formula, it should look like this:
EWF: 399% / 100% = 3.99
TWA: 266% / 100% = 2.66
These decimal values would be the multipliers for your "x" variable.

This is probably not the best way to mathematically explain my train of thought, and I guess it does not change the validity of your main idea as the spellraw values are the same and there's still a clear damage gap. Still, it might be best to stay as statistically accurate as possible if IM heeds your advice.
If I am horrendously wrong about something, feel free to call me an idiot and explain why.

 

That's true but also only relevant if you care about the actual y-axis values. As you mention, the intersection point stays the same in both cases. I would change it but... I'm too lazy to regenerate a graph...