Arknights: An Overview of Cold/Freeze and its Users

Hello! The current Break The Ice event brought us new units to fawn over, and that’s all nice. (Kjera hype!) But we also have a “new” mechanic along with our 3 new operators that came along with it, and fittingly, it’s called Cold. In this post I’ll be exploring what it really does, because guess what, it’s unclear and HG (NOT Yostar) doesn’t explain it well. I might provide some quick analysis for the 3 users of this new mechanic as well.

Cold is a “new” debuff that has an additional effect when applied again. I put “new” in quotes because this mechanic has already been used by the enemies back in chapter 6 and Frozen Abandoned City. But however painful that mechanic is against you, you can now inflict it back to the enemies, with extra debuff!

As of now there are only 3 operators that can inflict Cold: Gnosis, Kjera, and Aurora.

I also doubt we will ever get anyone else because of thematic reasons. At most, they are Black Knight (SA’s bodyguard, who is the boss of this event, also told to not being able to use Arts so highly unlikely) and Monch (Gnosis’ helper, also in this event). There's also Santalla who is teased way back in Operational Intelligence 3 years ago. 

Anyway, Cold is a debuff that reduces enemies’ ASPD by 30. That is actually a hefty amount. When applying Cold again, the enemy is Frozen, which is essentially a stun: can’t move, can’t attack, can’t use skill. But more than stun, Frozen also reduces RES by a flat 15.

The duration of Freeze is the second duration of Cold. You can have a 4 seconds Cold, and 1 second later apply a 2 seconds Cold, and the enemy will be Frozen for 2 seconds. You can have a 1 second Cold, apply a 4 second Cold, and the enemy will be Frozen for 4 seconds after the second Cold. When they unfreeze they are no longer Cold, because both Cold debuffs are removed to apply Freeze.

Cold and Freeze are 2 separate things. I’ll clarify this when I get to Gnosis.

Freeze and Stun are two separated things. However, almost no enemies that are freeze-immune but are not stun-immune (with the exception being both gundam from Dorothy's Vision event). So as of now, we can consider them to be “the same” in terms of “stopping an enemy.” This means Freeze is technically better than Stun as it also causes -15 RES to the enemy.

Too bad there are only 3 units in the game that can apply Cold for now.

Speaking of which…

Gnosis is the one with the easiest technique to apply Cold. His talent gives his basic attack a 1 second Cold. His skills either give him faster attack rate or instantly apply a layer of Cold or 2.

You might think that means if he’s attacking fast enough he’ll just perma freeze the enemy right? Like this GIF.

Also source: https://youtu.be/LU28sTzTi0w?t=993. But I actually just straight up took the particular GIF from this GP page.

Anyway, that's not the full story.

It’s time for me to circle back to that “Cold and Freeze are 2 separate things.” You see, Gnosis’ attack can apply Cold for 1s, so you might think that as long as he can attack once per second, he’ll perma-freeze the enemy… right?

Now this is a big fat NO.

This is when Cold doesn’t work as you think. In reality, when Freeze is applied, it also removes the current Cold stack on them. In the case that Gnosis is attack once per second, matching his Cold duration, he will not permafreeze, instead it will be Cold (0:00) → Freeze (0:01) → Cold + Freeze run out (0:02) → Freeze (0:03). There will be a second where the enemy doesn’t get frozen (from 0:02 to 0:03). See chart below.

Anyone that wants "haha freeze go brr" would need as high as +150 ASPD for him to have only 4 frames of Cold. Some enemies have short wind up time to their attack so I'm estimating 4 frames for extra safety.

Now the misconception has been taken care of. Let’s get back to Gnosis.

His talent doesn’t just let him apply Cold to his basic attack. It also debuffs all Cold enemies in his range with 25% Fragile (at E2), and then doubles that to 50% if they are Frozen. If you have his talent pot, that’s 27% and 54% respectively.

Any of his basic attacks benefits from the Fragile debuff. Yes. Something that Suzuran does not get. Before I used to believe that it was just too many layers of debuff to go through before the damage is applied (Sluggish → Fragile), but now with Gnosis having the same amount of layers and does benefit from his own Fragile, it is definitely a balance decision to remove that privilege from Suzu. Perhaps because there are plenty of Sluggish effects (i.e. any Decel Binder)?

Now for his skills. His S1 is okay against Mudrock Colossus, and that’s about it. There’s no charge stacking and no extra Cold duration so it’s only 1 second Freeze.

His S2 is polarizing. It instantly deals arts damage to all enemies in his range and applies 1 stack of Cold every 6SP. When charged (double the SP cost), applies 2 stacks of Cold instead, i.e. Freeze. It’s a very low cooldown, relatively high duration AoE freeze: 12s cooldown; 4s freeze; affect all enemies in his range. Against a single target, it’s a 6s cooldown. As a Freezer/Stunner, that’s amazing. But as a Fragile debuffer, that’s barely anything (unless you’re doing a full buff army that can kill anything in 4 seconds, but by this point that’s overkill/a meme). The uptime is massively improved with Suzuran, but the polarizing “problem” persists.

(It does work quite well with Ash whose S2 effectively lasts only 4 seconds, and stun/freeze immune are practically the same. If you can use Ash to stun them, you can also use Gnosis to Freeze. Note that Freeze does not count for Ash S2's condition. Same shoutout to Passenger for having another 4s skill and benefits from the -15 RES. Another shoutout to instant nuke skills like Fiammetta S2 or Cutter which are also short duration because well, "instant".)

His S3 has quite a myriad of effects. This skill first extends any freeze duration inside his range to the end of its duration. Then it gives him +130 ASPD so he can freeze the enemies, and attacks 2 enemies at once. It also prioritizes enemies that are not frozen. Then at the end of the skill duration, deals 600% arts damage to all Frozen enemies (in his range) and instantly removes the freeze effect. Oh did I say 600%? I meant 900% because of the 50% Fragile. All lasts for 13 whole seconds. That's technically still short as many burst DPS skills are longer, but 13s is enough to kill a lot of enemies, even without needing a large amount of other de/buffers.

Gnosis is one of the biggest jack of all trades in this game, as he can do a lot of things at once: DPS, CC, amplify damage, reduce RES, even AoE damage. But he is also not doing so well in any of them as he only has Supporter's stats for damage and his skills have some “relatively” low uptime.

Lots of people are saying he will be absolutely powerful in future events, so much so that he’s worth pulling just for that alone. Except… not really.

Alright, that’s most of the major details about Cold… wait it’s all Gnosis?

Now we get to the people with a less surefire way to inflict Cold. Kjera only has her S2 to do so.

When used, she gets 1 extra drone and the 2 drones now act independently from her (so BK’s disarm doesn’t stop them). Kjera and the drones each have a 22% chance to apply 2.5s Cold. So on every attack, there’s a 52.5% chance to apply Cold.

Sadly, since her (and the drone’s) attack interval is 1.3 seconds, she has to be able to apply Cold within 2 consecutive attacks, or 6 hits, because the Cold duration is 2.5 seconds. Unfortunately, that's a roughly 39.4% chance to cause Freeze in those 6 hits. But hey, it's a 2.5s Freeze, whereas Click only gets 1s stun, right?

Both Gnosis and Kjera deal arts damage, which means the Freeze’s “-15 RES” debuff benefits them a lot.

Again, remember that after freezing you still need to reapply Cold before another Freeze.

Aurora also only applies Cold through her S2.

Her S2 gives her 9 ammo (don’t ask me why slapping people requires ammo). It applies a 2.5 seconds Cold to her attack, but increases her attack interval to 2 seconds. So try not to get her any more -ASPD. It also gives her +75% ATK.

When she attacks a Frozen enemy, she no longer applies Cold, but instead deals a massive 330% ATK (including that +75% ATK before) to them. The important detail is that she does not apply Cold on this hit, meaning she has to apply it again on the next hit, and then Freeze again on the next next hit, before getting to do that huge hit again. The cycle goes Cold → Freeze → Huge Hit. With 9 ammo, that’s only 3 Huge Hit she gets to make against an enemy without other help.

So yes without external Cold, she’s quite bad. Plus she deals physical damage so no benefits from -15 RES. 20 SP cost is quite low though, even for her archetype.

Cold applies a -30 ASPD debuff to the enemy. No enemies are Cold immune (so far). Enemies with Freeze immunity are also the type that -30 ASPD is usually helpful against (i.e. slow attack hard hitting type). It’s also quite significant.

When applying Cold for the second time, it becomes Freeze. Freeze’s duration is the same as the duration of the second Cold. Freeze also removes the Cold debuff at the time and you have to reapply Cold before you can Freeze.

Freeze is essentially a Stun, with an additional debuff of -15 RES. All enemies (so far) who are stun-immune are also freeze-immune.

Gnosis has 1s Cold to all his basic attacks and applies 25% Fragile to all Cold enemies in his range, doubling that for Frozen enemies. His S2 focuses on the Freeze frequency while his S3 focuses on an AoE long duration freeze+fragile debuff with a relatively long downtime. Against Freeze immune enemies, he can still give 25% fragile along with the -30 ASPD at least. Definitely NOT needed for future contents despite what some people might say. (You might want to scroll up if you want to see why. Yes I am assuming you skipped straight here). He’s still a good choice. But there are a couple upcoming units that are directly more powerful, and less easily shut down with a “freeze immune: true”. Look no further than CC#9 and its risk set (if you want to spoil yourself). It's both a testament of how powerful he can be that they have to stop him, and how easily he is to be stopped.

Kjera has RNG Cold attached to her S2. Roughly 39% chance to apply Freeze with her basic attacks (2 attack cycles), though that chance increases by a lot when her attack interval is fast enough to fit in another cycle before the 2.5s Cold end. ASPD buffs will be really beneficial to her. As an arts DPS unit, she definitely will appreciate the -15 RES from Freeze debuff as well.

Aurora sucks. Can deal some sick damage when provided with a constant Freeze though.

Anyway, that should be it for Cold and Freeze. I hope you learn something new at the very least… maybe?

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time, hopefully for Kroos The Keen Glint, otherwise, a different general mechanic post.