Holy moly. The nerfs to freeze are sooooo massive. Freezing bosses is probably about 90-99% harder now. It got hit by like 7 combined nerfs:
Bosses have 50% more effective health against stun and freeze
Freeze has nothing to do with the damage reduction changes (stun is impacted) as the freeze calculation has nothing to do with damage dealt. So now there is a 50% nerf to freeze off this alone.
changed freeze chance to take ward into account
If the above 50% nerf wasn’t enough, it’s even worse since now it accounts for ward the bosses will gain.
Snap Freeze: Cryomancy now grants 10% increased freeze duration per point (from 12%), and its maximum points has been reduced to 4 (from 5)
More nerfs to snap freeze
Freeze Rate Per Stack of Chill: * T7 grants 51-65% freeze rate (from 86-105%)
Enormous nerf to this affix. This was one of the most reliable ways of building up freeze because the mod is a multiplicative increase to freeze rate (as opposed to flat +freeze rate which is additive). They nerfed this affix by ~40%.
Frostbite Shackles - * Now grants +1% ward retention per 2% uncapped cold resistance (from +1% ward retention per 1% uncapped cold resistance)
Freeze builds are already extremely gear intensive and usually don’t have the best ward generation already. So now that freeze is even harder they massively nerfed the defense of such builds… Every freeze build ran this.
Oceareon - * Freeze rate per stack of chill affix has been replaced with 2% to 4% less damage taken from chilled enemies
Did they mention they don’t want you freezing enemies anymore? This is another massive nerf to freeze as its a multiplicative increase stat as mentioned above. Every freeze build ran this (or two of them). To put it in perspective, if you didn’t have any other source of “freeze rate per stack of chill”, a perfect rolled oceareon (200% roll) at 3 stacks of chill was a x7 freeze rate multiplier which is now gone.
Snowdrift - * Now grants 1% cold penetration with Frostbite per 10% freeze rate multiplier (from 2% per 10%)
Seriously freeze and freeze rate is completely dead now and the associated mods are basically dead filler stats. Freeze rate is basically only good for scaling snowdrift at this point and not for its actual intended usage. Very sad, it was a very fun build style that EHG apparently wants to no longer exist.