(08-08-2017, 12:11 PM)Valence Wrote:I mean it's a little of both really. Astral ice would probably be nice but sending out shards of freezing ice probably isn't as powerful as shooting fireballs of burning aether. Thinking about it literally, throwing an ice cube at someone vs throwing a gasoline covered torch, one's obviously more effective than the other. Ideally I imagine they could go either way with the polarities in thaumaturgy but they chose to make fire their damage dealer since it's more naturally astral and powerful to use considering what fire is in itself. While the ice could probably be just as useful astrally, it's like shown, more umbral in nature and would be better suited to cool off their aether.(08-08-2017, 06:10 AM)Valic Wrote: Specifically your analogy toward heat representing them, as that's exactly how my lore savvy friend described them as well. As for the thaumaturge mention at the end, we actually recently had that talk as well. Discussing if they were somehow in an area much more aligned umbrally that they would be more like to use the reverse of what they use now. Though again like you said, it would be clunky and counter intuitive to be using what forces would be considered less devastating as a main offense and vice versa. It can be done but it's just not simply because of logic.
Well it's not that astral ice is by necessity less potent than astral fire, I meant more like, since it's harder to find astral ice and easier to come by astral fire, it probably requires less resources or something to build up...? But then again, as I said above, it's pure speculation on my part. It just seems to make sense to explain why it's Astral Fire and Umbral Ice and not the other way.
It could be that it's actually as easy to generate astral ice than umbral ice, or whatever. I would advise not to put too much weight behind those hypothesises. I generally don't like hypothesises and I rarely give in to them, especially since it's by definition out of the lore.
As far as I understood, thaumaturgy relied on the concept of umbral ice to both cool their own reserves down(to prevent burning out their mana supply or just out right turning all of their aether into fire and incinerating themselves just like black mages can do without the stone) and to cause a sort of vacuum effect of natural aether to replenish themselves. They exhaust the power of fire with an astral polarity then when exhausted, swap to umbral to create a sort of magnet or vacuum of aether for astral aether to flow and be manipulated. Since aether always flows naturally to where there is none, having this opposed polarity with little mana in your body functions like a magnet being cut in half. It simply wants to exist to counter the opposite polarity that you induce on youself, (hence the status of umbral ice and vice versa). Considering umbrally polarized aether in nature is slow and progressive than active, it would take a while for you to absorb umbral polarized aether while in an astral state of mind.
Simply put, your aether is on fire, it won't want to bring in cold ice aether that easily, even with the polarization being opposite. Change your mind to a state if umbral ice though, that ice aether will feel naturally inclined to cool your aether and the opposite polarity will attract it to do so and fill more easily since astral aether will be actively wanting to flow and replenish reserves. Umbral aether will be more passive/slow and won't quite do that on it's own, so thaumaturges just abuse these polarities to cool down and also repelnish. Why fire astral and ice umbral? Like I said, fire hurts more typically.... Ice can but you need something to cool yourself from all that fire and an opposing polarity to replenish those reserves to chuck more of that fire. Could you reverse this?... Prolly, and I'm probably repeating myself here, but natural alignment probably makes it easier to manipulate certain elements and their polarities when you don't have to completely rework them (ice naturally more umbral? Why go through the trouble of polarizing it to be astral then, work with what you got!).
Logic just dictates to gather what's more handy/accessible and make the most viable use out of what you have. We have these types of aether naturally around as they are, less strain to manipulate them to be different than as they are, so I'll use this element to deal devastating blows and this to cool off, and I won't require to deal with so much just for arbitrary decision of wanting to fling ice at something instead of fire. That's the logic I see it as anyways, which makes the most sense considering how the concept of thaumaturgy originated to begin with(fire to burn corpses, cold... Not ice specifically... but "cold" to keep the body from corrupting). They're just using what they have readily as resources in the most viable solution using the basic concepts they began with into making it a modern form of magic for combat.