Freezing

Version 0.27: 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 an additional 0 to 50% cold damage (reduced proportionally by cold resistance). Although less effective against creatures with cold resistance, it can devastate anything vulnerable to cold. 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. In ice caves there are often freezing weapons. Fannar always comes with a staff of cold, or a quarterstaff of freezing. Wights frequently carry weapons of freezing. Otherwise, reading a scroll of brand weapon has a good chance to apply the freezing brand to your weapon.

History

Prior to 0.15, unbranded weapon could be temporarily given this brand with the level 2 spell Freezing Aura. This temporary brand could be made permanent by reading a scroll of vorpalise weapon.