Does an ability with a spell tag mean it deals flat spell damage? For example, Ice thorns is tagged as physical, cold and spell. I converted all base cold to physical because I wanted to try the bleed node. So does increases to spell damage or added flat spell damage increase the base physical damage or is spell damage treated as its own damage type. Hope this isn’t confusing lol!
as far as i understand it, adaptive spell damage will be added to the base damage of a skill, which will then be affected by anything that applies to the base damage (including conversion).
also, you technically don’t need to deal phys damage to cause bleeds. bleed damage is not determined by base damage, but is rather applied by any skill that hits with a chance to bleed. the nice thing about converting all cold to phys is that %increased phys damage will apply to both your hit damage and the bleed.
however if your build is going to scale ailment damage, it’s generally best to focus on stacking the ailment as many times as possible. this is especially true with the way poison works right now. (it scales off itself because each stack increases the poison damage the enemy takes). bleed doesn’t have the same sort of self scaling so the best way to scale it is to increase your bleed chance and damage over time. having ailment chance over 100% gives a chance to apply another stack with each hit, 200% guarantees 2 stacks, etc.
spell damage won’t affect the bleed at all, unless there’s a node i’m unaware of that causes it to apply.
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So basically, spell damage will just increase the hit damage but not the physical damage over time right?
correct. 
Though converting to phys would allow you to benefit more from the +% increased physical damage affixes that you’d be stacking in a bleed build (since they’d buff the hit damage as well as the DoT).
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