Freezing

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

The freezing brand causes a weapon to freeze its target, inflicting additional cold damage. Although less effective against creatures with cold resistance, it can devastate anything vulnerable to cold. Due to the fact that few enemies outside of the Ice Cave and Cocytus are fully immune to cold damage, freezing is considered the most universally useful weapon brand. A weapon with this brand will glow with a cold, blue light when wielded, identifying it.

As an added effect, this brand is extremely useful when fighting cold-blooded monsters, as there is a chance with each hit that they will be temporarily slowed (so long as they are not resistant to cold). This makes freezing weapons extremely useful for dealing with the draconian hordes encountered in the Realm of Zot.

This brand works best on heavy, high-damage weapons, since the extra cold damage dealt is determined by the amount of normal weapon damage you manage to get past an enemy's AC.

Sources

Along with simply finding freezing weapons as randomly generated loot, there are a few sources guaranteed to generate them. Frost giants always carry freezing battleaxes, and any unbranded weapon can be temporarily given this brand with the level 2 spell Freezing Aura. This temporary brand can be made permanent by reading a scroll of vorpalise weapon.

Damage

• Normal: +0% to +50% cold damage (25% on average)
• rC+: +0% to +25%
• rC++: +0% to +10%
• rC+++: No additional damage
• rC-: +0% to +75%

The amount of damage dealt by any given attack is reflected by the punctuation at the end of message:

• 1-2 "You freeze ... ."
• 3-6 "You freeze ... !"
• 7+ "You freeze ... !!"