Help with freeze (duration ) please

Playing Frostblades for the first time and while I freeze trash mobs all the time, I struggle to freeze anything rare or above. I'm not a good player so I had to look up the mechanics, and the wiki says:

freezes under 0.3 seconds are discarded, and those are freezes from hits that don't do enough damage compared to the ailment threshold, which is the enemy life.

Is that correct so far?

It also says that increasing ailment duration (but NOT effect) can help this.

4. questions:

1. I don't have much inherent "chance to freeze" on my setup, so I guess my freezes (of trash mobs) comes from crits, which I do a lot. I must be critting rares and bosses too - so just my damage must suck. So where can I find sources of increasing ailment duration?

2. Or is looking for such sources futile and it just makes sense to find ways of increasing damage, is that easier?

3. If I crit, I have 100% chance to freeze - but ONLY with the cold damage portion of my hit is calculated into the ailment threshold check - right?

4. Even if my chance to freeze is 100% (which it is from crits, right?) and I'm not freezing then I am doing something wrong?

Is they guy you are talking about the level 54 character Thyief?

If that is the case, give it time to level up, get better gear and an ascendancy or two.

A few things:
You are using frost blades which is a low damage fast hitting skill. Since freeze duration is based on the damage of an individual hit vs enemy health you will have trouble freezing anything tankier than a blue mob. Especially lategame there will be no way to freeze rare and unique mobs effectively, and some are outright immune.

You don't need chance to freeze if you have a crit build. Crits have a 100% chance to freeze but, as you mentioned in point 3, only from the cold portion of the attack. Try and convert 100% of your damage to cold if you can.

In my opinion it's not worth investing into freeze duration, it won't be enough to help you freeze rares and bosses. Better to learn their mechanics and avoid most of it, deal more damage so you can kill them faster, and invest into other defensive layers in order to survive these mobs while you kill them.

Ailment effect doesn't do anything for freeze, period.

Don't try to lean into freeze as an effective defensive layer and just enjoy the sounds of shattering trash mobs. That's the main thing freeze will do for you.

"

Bardharr wrote:

A few things:
You are using frost blades which is a low damage fast hitting skill. Since freeze duration is based on the damage of an individual hit vs enemy health you will have trouble freezing anything tankier than a blue mob. Especially lategame there will be no way to freeze rare and unique mobs effectively, and some are outright immune.

You don't need chance to freeze if you have a crit build. Crits have a 100% chance to freeze but, as you mentioned in point 3, only from the cold portion of the attack. Try and convert 100% of your damage to cold if you can.

In my opinion it's not worth investing into freeze duration, it won't be enough to help you freeze rares and bosses. Better to learn their mechanics and avoid most of it, deal more damage so you can kill them faster, and invest into other defensive layers in order to survive these mobs while you kill them.

Ailment effect doesn't do anything for freeze, period.

Don't try to lean into freeze as an effective defensive layer and just enjoy the sounds of shattering trash mobs. That's the main thing freeze will do for you.

Alright, thanks much, I think I get it.
The sound of trash shattering is indeed nice, I'll try to enjoy it while I can, I'm afraid I was indeed leaning into freeze as a defensive layer (never tried it before) and I guess it just won't work against the enemies I need defending from.