Class Building Questions

Does WFF refer to WF (a build purely composing of inteligence and defence sp)

And is there a specific way one should powder a weapon? (For instance, sometimes I see items powdered like T-W-W instead of just W-W-T or even W-T-W, perhaps not those particular powders or in that order, but the point is sometimes the powdering of an item seems in a deliberate order, and not just slapping powders on there. Is there a reason for this, or is it just for funzies?)
(Also, to clarify, I’m not asking about powder specials, I’m asking if there’s a mechanic, like elemental damage % conversions that are more beneficial with certain powder orders or something)

 

As far as the second bit goes,

The usual reason for this I think is getting a certain powder special while also maximizing damage, eg powdering freedom FTTF, for courage but also two thunders for damage.

 

Right, but is there a reason to powder FTTF over FFTT?

 

Depends on build I suppose, but more neutral is left for thunder conversion if you only do the one fire first to secure the special

 

only place ive seen duplicate elemental letters (like WFF) used is in powdering, where it's not directly related to the elemental types of the build

in short: when casting spells, natural elemental conversion is calculated before powders.

take any weapon with neutral damage and powder slots, say a hive weapon. even when you powder all of the neutral damage away, (say, 5 water t6s) it still deals earth and fire damage with meteor. this is because spells take their elemental damage from the weapon's base neutral damage before even looking at its powders. this means that when powdering wands, you only have power over 40% of the elements its neutral damage will be converted into (meteor has 30% earth and 30% fire conversion)
this means the first powder you put has the most effect as to which element the neutral damage will sway. say you want a morrowind with curse. the optimal powdering be AWW (assuming you have more air % damage than water) instead of any other combination of the three, so you get 35 of the 40% neutral damage converted to air

this affects every class in different ways and amounts. you can find the elemental conversion %s from the official help page

hope this helps. also related to the other discussion here, FTTF vs FFTT on freedom is 99.9% aesthetic, as it effectively has no neutral

 

Thank you very much for the help!