Chill and Freeze

Cold damage is the one element that does something besides damage: every cold hit chills its target for a length the skill or item carries, and a chill is a slow. Some skills freeze instead, which stops the monster entirely. Both lengths are shrunk by the difficulty, and both are set per monster by a column most players never see.

Chill: a slow set by the monster

A chilled monster moves and attacks slower by its own cold-effect figure in monstats.txt, which differs by monster and by difficulty:

So a chill that halves a Fallen in Normal takes a tenth off Diablo in Hell and nothing at all off Hell Andariel. The monster pages list each one's figure. The chill's length is the skill's cold length (skills.txt ELen plus its per-level brackets; the skill page's "Chill length" column) or the item's "cold damage over X seconds".

chill or freeze length on a monster = skill or item length ÷ MonsterColdDivisor (or MonsterFreezeDivisor)

Freeze

Freezes Target on an item and the freezing skills hold the monster in place for the length instead of slowing it; the difficulty divides the length the same way (MonsterFreezeDivisor). A monster whose cold-effect figure is 0 in a difficulty, like Hell Andariel above, is not slowed by a chill at all.

On you

The chill a monster puts on you slows you the same way; [[half-freeze-duration]] halves its length and [[cannot-be-frozen]] removes it. See Slows Target for the slow that is not cold.

Cannot Be Frozen is a defensive stat for melee characters because a chilled attack speed means a chilled breakpoint: one chill can push a melee character down a breakpoint for its whole length. See Attack Speed.