Explain to me why a fucking ice bolt deals ice or magic damage instead of piercing/blunt damage

Explain

magic

I ain't gotta explain shit

I trust this man he is a wizard

Ice spells shouldn't be literal icicles anyway, that would be like if a fire spell also came with a burning piece of wood.
Fucking nobody wonders what exactly is fueling the magic fireball or what's keeping it in one piece, because it's fucking magic.
Ice spells should be similar magic iceballs, not literal slabs of ice.

what the fuck is water damage
like just hold your breath for 5 seconds

what the fuck is water damage

This.

just hold your br-

Don't listen to this vaping faggot, nobody who uses a fucking wooden stick to cast spells can be trusted with actual magical knowledge, plus he has a halfling fetish and probably likes K*nders as well.
Spells still obey the rules of the natural world, it goes without saying that a fucking ice spear would impale shit because why the fuck would your stupid ass even shape ice in the form of a spear to begin with if not for PIERCING shit? The FORM must answer some INTENT and OBEY LAWS, there's no such thing as "ice", "wind" or "earth" damage, at best you're cooling matter, which result in what you might call a "cold" attribute for your spells, since they cool shit, ice is cool so an ice bolt would logically be Pierce+Cold.

The truth is most vidya follow cargo cult conventions that don't make any sense and aren't even good design, but have been repeated for so long that most designers (who are also incompetent) blindly accept them, there are games where non lazy designers actually do make this shit

Because it's not true solid Ice and turns into liquid on contact with people.

this is a combination of water + earth as water cutters need a solid abrasive additive to perform correctly

Think about what enemies would be weak to water damage
Its gonna be some dude who is made of fire
You think ice wouldnt melt into water when it hits him?

water damage eventually turns into mold dot

would be neat

magic

obey laws

fake wizard

I disagree, Arrows should be mixed feather/wood/ and flint damage.

is magic damage just allergies

and why would it do that? for what reason? to make the person freeze? retarded adding of a middle man when you could just freeze the water around or in the target itself.

Nah man, I trust the experts. This is just more misinformation from the mouth of Sauron.

Gandalf, why are wizards 100x cooler when they have a gun?

does an ice cube instantly melt when you toss it in fire?

but magic-

the guy is made of magic fire and you're throwing magic ice at him, i don't know what interaction should be expected here

No its just that the design of a game where you shoot fucking ice spears out of your hand isn’t going for milsim levels of realism. The depth of the design in a game with typed damage comes from the interactions of damage types with weaknesses
If you are going to only make ice spells that are JUST blasts of cold air or something, your hands are tied when it comes to flavor
If you want a fast moving, heavy hitting single target projectile attack that does ice damage how are you supposed to flavor it other than ice spear?

Now I'm just picturing firefighters fighting fires by chucking chunks of ice at the inferno.

water doesn't beat fire

This

It's based of you to use a flesh and blood artwork. Game's lit, can't wait for the high seas prerelease.

Yes, magic obeys laws, you little manaless shit.
And that old clueless faggot with a stick there is also bound to those laws, he's the slave of a god after all, why wouldn't he be?
Knowledge of those laws is what separates a walking plot device with a wooden stick from a great magician, much like you foolishly avoid females until your 30th winter (while still being guilty of misuse of your hands) in the vain hope of getting magical powers instead of sitting the fuck down and learning the rules like you should.

If you want a fast moving, heavy hitting single target projectile attack that does ice damage

There shouldn't be Ice damage to begin with you clown, you already failed at basic game design by then and your game is shit.

It depends man

It discharges on impact as a flash-freeze effect. The bolt is simply a delivery mechanism.

This, same concept as poison arrows or silver bullets.

Looking at Ice Knife in DND the projectile itself does piercing damage.

As for things where it does cold damage, it's magic.

Because the spell was invented at a time where the only way a wizard could imagine freezing someone was by creating a freezing projectile at them.
The spell was limited by the scientific understanding and creativity of the time.

fireball

does ball damage

This is a very narrow and uninformed viewpoint, likely from a sorcerer with limited (at best) understanding of the magical power his bloodline has gifted him. Gifts he unfortunately squanders with his ignorance.
Spells do not obey the laws of the natural world because they are by nature not of the natural world. Once again, the appearance of a magical bolt is largely irrelevant. A freezing spell would typically be represented by something cold or frozen as a byproduct of the process a wizard uses to mentally shape the magical energies to his will, but the exact form has no bearing on the spell in question. It could be a sharpened icicle, a snowball, a twisting mass of snowflakes, even an icy ethereal bird that appears to dive towards its intended target. The spell itself is what matters, and in this example case, the spell in question is intended to freeze the target.
You could of course cast a spell that is intended to physically impale the target with a sharpened spear that could be, though would not necessarily need to be, a sharpened icicle, but that is a separate spell entirely.

cone of cold

does icecream damage

Magical damage should only be categorized into fire, ice and lightning
Physical damage should only be categorized into piercing, slashing and thwacking
Anything past that should be either removed or counted as a status effect

Nobody ever thought to be resistant to ball damage. The fire part is just a ruse.

Think about what enemies would be weak to water damage

An enemy made of sugar or salt, probably

if it's dry ice it would do ice damage by giving you frostbite quickly

whats magic missile do

Because it's a video game and it wouldn't be very fun if elements like ice, wind, earth all dealt physical damage. You already have earth as the designated "physical magic" when the devs want such a thing.

It should deal piercing/ice on impact, and apply a water DoT

Having to figure out if the game has Ice, Water or both elements to figure out the type match up for effective casting

Game lacks an element system altogether

game lacks element system

but some enemies are coded to take more damage from specific spells

Yo, Gandalf. Where does earth magic fit here?

I get coded logic is totally arbitrary, I've done it myself, but sometimes man, it still just drives me crazy.

its magic and game-wise, its for balance.
You're just going to make ice, earth, and whatever the fuck else you can form into a piercing bolt to be all the same with only different colors. It also makes physical weapons weaker than magic if you can have them do both their physical and magical damage. Elemental defense is going to be different, too, no amount of ice resistance is going to stop an ice bolt from piercing through you.

what i want to know is how water damage can kill
its basically just drowning or blunt force

thunder is the noise
lightning is the bolt
how do people still fail to know this

water with enough pressure can fuck shit up. it's basically a jet cutter that can slice granite.

that was already mentioned in the thread apparently, but i know that because i am a stone mason and our viperjet table uses garnet to pressure cut granite marble quartz etc. jer cut steel, all types of shit. but yea thats cuz it has garnet particulate in it

i forgot about particulates. i thought it was just pure water for some reason. in that case idk.

uuuuuuh bro it's just I dunno your imagination or something lmao

there's no laws bro just think really hard about things, ignore how those things you think about really hard can only form by obeying laws in the first place

For somebody who likes to call his betters sorcerers and parade around like a wizard you sure do think and act like a sorcerer, you vaping faggot, clearly INT is your dump stat.
Spells obey the laws of the natural world because they exist in the natural world to begin with, and must interact with it to work, how else are you going to freeze things if not using the laws of the natural world that allows for such phenomena to exist?
Of course a god's lapdog who didn't actually have to strive and study to understand magic wouldn't know this, after all you do nothing but molesting halflings all day, and vape.
Also thisHeat, Cold, Electricity and Slash, Pierce, Blunt.
That's all you need.

Glorified arrow, I wouldn't include such a spell in the first place

Agreed.

Wind is the same thing really or Rock. Thats why the Ice Element needs to be named Cold from now on.

That depends on the spell, of course, but for a simple, direct offensive spell typically these would indeed be some form of physical damage, with the exact type of damage dependent on the spell in question. A conjured stone could crush its target, or a spray of coarse sand could cause lacerations, for example. It's also not entirely unreasonable to assume that an entity either diametrically or elementally opposed to the concept of earth could be inversely affected by exposure to it in a manner separate from simple physical trauma, thus achieving a form of specialized "earth damage".

gameplay reasons goofus

its both, it should be both. Ice needs to be renamed cold though so redditors cannot do the "acktually" gay takes they do.

Magic may appear to obey the laws of the natural world as it enforces its influence on the natural world in ways typically considered natural, for instance to start fires, inflict physical trauma, or freeze objects, as with the running examples, but this isn't a hard rule. More advanced magic, and magic beyond simple damaging spells frequently do not obey natural laws. The relatively simple passwall spell is a perfect example of this, with some versions of the spell creating a perfect temporary passage through solid objects that does not affect their structural integrity, and other versions of the spell allowing you to step through solid stone as though it were as thin as air.
But the lingering problem here from the original example is that you're assuming that a magical icicle from a freezing spell would function the same way a thrown physical icicle would. To put it in simpler terms, the bolt is simply a vehicle for the freezing spell to reach its target. The appearance of the bolt as an icicle is of little consequence to the effect of the spell. Again, the bolt could take just about any form, what matters is the intent of the spell that was cast, and in the example provided the intent of the spell was to freeze its target.

Its gonna be some dude who is made of fire

Not gonna lie, the "elemental" enemy that's made ENTIRELY out of fire/water/air or whatever is an extremely lazy trope that needs to be done away with.
If you need to contrive such an enemy's existence in order to justify your game's elemental resistances and weaknesses system, then maybe the system isn't all that justified.
There's no logical reason why a blue turtle that spits water from its mouth is inexplicably unscathed when you put it under a blowtorch. There are fish that spit water in real life, and you can burn them to death just as easily.

its magic, i ain't gotta explain shit!

.

There's no logical reason why a blue turtle that spits water from its mouth is inexplicably unscathed when you put it under a blowtorch.

It's aligned with the elemental sphere of water which gives it resistance to the effects of fire.
Honestly the "problems" with such systems are easily solved by not being an unimaginative dullard who can only think in terms of what's realistic.

Hmm, I see. And the common way people visualize said physical trauma through rock throwing. Very fascinating.

The water forces itself into you and you become hyponatremic suffer confusion and eventual brain damage

Why not both? Magica's magic system was pretty damn good.

Only if you're cutting steel and even then exposure to plain water will still rapidly ablate it. A pure water jet will sail through flesh and bone.

Gandalf schooling wannabe mages itt.