Status effects: which ones are worth it

Freeze is worth building for, but you never build for freeze directly. Freeze is what Frostbite turns into once it reaches five stacks on a target, so a freeze build is a frostbite build, and a frostbite build is a Cold Damage build. That relationship — one status feeding into another, all of them scaling off a damage stat you were stacking anyway — is the thing that makes the kit worth understanding.

What each one does

The game states these in its own words. Where a duration or a percentage is left out below, it is because the value changes with the source that applied it and there is no single figure to quote.

Effect	What it does
Stun	Prevents the target from acting for 1 second.
Frostbite	Reduces the target’s Move Speed for a time. Maximum 5 stacks; at 5 stacks it changes to Freeze.
Freeze	Deals Ice damage and stuns the target.
Burn	Deals Fire damage every 0.5 seconds for a duration, and stacks.
Electrocution	Runs for a duration and deals Lightning damage when it ends. Maximum 2 stacks, the longer it ran the bigger the payoff, and stacking does not refresh the duration.
Enhanced Electrocution	Immediately deals one stack of Electrocution damage, then applies Electrocution.
Plasma	Treated as both Burn and Electrocution, using the average of your Fire Damage and Lightning Damage as its coefficient.
Blue Burn	Scales off the higher of your Fire and Ice damage, with extra damage equal to 25% of the lower one.
Shock	Reduces the target’s Defense by 20.
Corrosion	Eats 20 HP per second, then deals Void damage equal to the Corrosion value when it ends.
Wound	Deals Chaos damage every 1 second for a duration.
Poison	Deals Chaos damage over time, and increases all debuff damage while it is running.
Execution	Doubles critical damage.
Atrocious Deed	On you, not the enemy: your Barter drops.

The three the game tracks as status effects proper — Airborne, Freeze and Stun — are the hard crowd control. Everything else in the table is damage or a stat change wearing a timer. You can browse them on the status effect pages.

How they chain

The chains are the whole point, and there are four of them.

Cold chains upward. Frostbite slows, five stacks becomes Freeze, and Freeze both hits for Ice damage and applies a stun. So cold is the only element whose damage-over-time also buys you control. Building Glacier shortens that ladder: at ten artifacts in the combo, Freeze needs one fewer Frostbite stack than normal, removing a fifth of the ramp before an enemy locks up.

Lightning chains sideways. Electrocution’s damage arrives at the end, not during, and re-applying it does not refresh the timer. That makes it the one status where reapplying faster is not automatically better; you want the duration to run out. Enhanced Electrocution exists precisely to front-load that payout, and Magitech’s ten-artifact bonus shortens the time Electrocution takes to go off.

Fire chains through hybrids. Burn on its own is a 0.5-second tick. Plasma is Burn and Electrocution simultaneously, priced off the average of your Fire and Lightning damage, which makes it the reward for a genuinely split build rather than a badly focused one. Blue Burn does the same trick for Fire and Cold, taking the higher pool and adding a quarter of the lower.

Poison chains into everything. It raises all debuff damage while it runs, so it belongs on a build that already has three other timers ticking, not on one that has none.

What applies them

The reliable source is a combo. The Ember, Glacier and Magitech families share one template: from two artifacts in the combo you inflict the matching debuff whenever you deal that element’s damage — debuff damage itself excluded, so the effect cannot re-trigger off its own ticks. At six, that proc recovers far faster. At ten, each family rewrites its own keyword: Ember upgrades Burn’s base damage, Glacier drops the Frostbite stacks needed for Freeze, and Magitech makes Electrocution go off sooner.

That two-artifact threshold is the important number. It is cheap, it is the point where a status build starts existing at all, and it means a handful of the right artifacts converts a normal elemental build into a status one without changing anything else about it. Individual weapons and artifacts apply debuffs too, and their cards say which.

What makes them hit harder

Debuff damage is priced off the matching damage pool, so there is no such thing as a status build that is not an elemental damage build. Cold Damage is what makes your Freeze hurt; Fire Damage is what makes your Burn hurt. See stats explained for which stats feed which pool and which are decoration.

On top of that, two things pay you specifically for having debuffs running. The Curse combo raises damage dealt with a debuff at two artifacts, and again at four. The Orange Rabbit costume raises the same thing by 14% at the cost of 8 Defense, which is one of the cleanest trades in the costume list if the run is already committed.

What shrugs them off

• Elemental resistance. Because debuff damage is elemental damage, anything that resists the element resists the status. Positive resistance is capped at 99, and against a compound element only the single highest matching resistance applies. Hard mode adds boss modifiers that resist a specific damage type by 33% outright, which is enough to make a single-element status build feel broken on the wrong fight.
• Toughness. It removes a flat amount from every hit taken. A status effect delivers its damage in many small pieces, and flat subtraction is roughest on small pieces. Every hit still lands for at least 1, so a tick never disappears entirely — it just stops mattering.
• Bosses. Hard mode gives bosses their own modifier list, and only the resist-an-element ones bite here. The rest — resisting critical chance, ignoring your Defense, ignoring your Evasion — leave your timers running untouched, which is a quiet argument for statuses as a boss-damage plan.

So is freeze worth building for?

Yes, on one condition: commit. Freeze is the payoff at the top of a ladder that starts with Cold Damage, runs through Glacier’s two-artifact proc, and only becomes reliable once the proc comes back quickly enough to keep stacks climbing. Two cold artifacts and a bit of Cold Damage gets you occasional slows. Ten gets you enemies that stop moving.

The same logic applies to every family. Burn is the most forgiving because it needs nothing but Fire Damage and time. Electrocution is the most demanding because its damage is back-loaded and punishes impatience. Cold is the only one that also solves your survivability problem, which is usually the deciding argument. If a run is already going wrong for other reasons, read damage math before adding more sources — a status build with a thin damage pool is a very slow way to lose.