Freezes Target

September 1, 2026

Freezes Target is a chance to freeze the regular monster or minion that was struck. Every other unit it hits is chilled instead, and cold immune targets are unaffected either way.

Frozen against chilled

A frozen monster is held in place and does nothing at all until it wears off. A chilled one keeps fighting at a reduced attack rate and movement speed. Freezes Target only produces the first of those on regular monsters and minions. Champions, uniques, super uniques, act bosses, players, mercenaries and pets are chilled by it, never frozen.

How hard the chill bites is set by the target's chill effectiveness. Players, mercenaries and pets sit at −50, which is the usual value. A handful of units are at 0 and take no slowdown whatsoever, including Bone Wall, Bone Prison, barricades, catapults, the elemental towers and a number of monsters in Hell.

On a slow weapon with no accuracy support the freeze is worth more than the number suggests, because a target standing still is far easier to hit.

The chance to freeze

The number on the item is not a duration and it is not a flat chance. It feeds a formula built the same way as the one behind Hit Blinds Target, so the level of the character relative to the monster matters as much as the item does.

B is the sum of Freezes Target on the gear, A the attacker level and D the monster level. The result is clamped between 0% and 100%.
Attack	Chance
Melee	5 × (4B + A − D) + 30
Missile	5 × (4B + A − D) / 3

Every point is worth 20 percentage points and every level over the monster another 5. Against a monster of the character's own level, a single +1 already freezes on half of the hits that land in melee, +3 on 90% of them, and the +4 on Frostwind is over the cap. That +4 is the largest fixed roll in the game, with Nord's Tenderizer at 2-4 and Cham Rune, Axe of Fechmar, Sureshrill Frost and Buriza-Do Kyanon at +3.

The missile line is the important one on a bow or a throwing weapon: it loses the flat 30 entirely and then divides by three, so the same +3 that gives 90% in melee gives 20% at range against an equal-level monster.

How long it holds

The length is a random odd number of frames between 27 and (2 × chance) + 25, so it always lasts at least about 1.1 seconds and reaches 9 seconds only at a 100% chance. The chance figure therefore does double duty: it decides how often the freeze lands and how long it can possibly hold.

That length is then cut by the target's cold resistance and by the difficulty penalty, halved in Nightmare and quartered in Hell. A freeze that would lock a monster for 9 seconds in Normal is worth a little over 2 seconds in Hell before resistance is even counted.

It is applied independently of freeze length and cold length, so the two stack up rather than replacing each other.

Freezing Arrow freezes everything in its radius for about 2 seconds while Freezes Target freezes the monster actually hit by the arrow for its own 1 to 9 seconds.

The corpse problem

A monster killed while chilled or frozen has a 20% chance to shatter and leave no corpse. For most builds that is scenery, but a Necromancer loses the resource the whole class is built on, since

Corpse Explosion,

Raise Skeleton and

Revive all need a body. A Barbarian using

Find Item loses the extra drops for the same reason. Shattering does not stop the monster from dropping items.

Limitations

It only applies through a weapon attack that lands. Any melee or ranged attack carries it except
Blade Sentinel,
Blade Shield and the extra arrows of
Multiple Shot, where only the original two arrows apply it.
Cold immune monsters get nothing from it, and cold immunity is common in Hell, which is where the property loses most of its value.
Anything with 0 chill effectiveness is equally unaffected, even though it is not immune.
Only regular monsters and minions actually freeze. Everything tougher, and every player, mercenary and pet, is only chilled.
When two weapons are equipped, only the bonus on the weapon making the attack counts; the one on the other hand is ignored for that swing.
Against a player, Cannot Be Frozen removes what little it would have done.

Sources

A socketed Cham Rune grants Freezes Target +3 on any weapon. Magic and rare items can never roll it, so every other source is a unique item, a set item or a runeword. Axe of Fechmar is by far the earliest, at required level 8.