awwwwwww yissss it’s muddaflipping F R O S T T I M E babeyyyyyyyyyy

One of my top 11 frames. I’m going to be really enthusiastic about this bad boy, so that should tell you how much I love my top 5.

Frost has an absolutely amazing kit. Aside from his Passive, which might as well just not exist. Enemies have no armour, either can’t move, or move and shoot very slowly. And his augments are amazing. If I have one complaint, the 15m range and 60% strip on Avalanche means a good Avalanche build is going to be juggling some things, either taking a shard investment or needing to dip into Equilibrium negative efficiency builds. Only really relevant for SP Circuit though.

Frost is one of my staples for Archon Hunts, since he kind of just does everything you need for every mission type, with high damage output and great party support, and braindead easy objective defense.

Cold is just straight up a universal utility element, although often hard to justify putting on your weapons (Corr/Cold raw is making a bit of a comeback with Primary Frostbite though if you’re willing to make some small compromises on paper-DPS). Nothing is immune to Cold status, aside from some bosses. Even Acolytes and Overguard get slapped by it, although it is capped until you break Overguard. At 4x, it’s a 65% slow, so almost 3x penalty to moving and shooting. At 9x, the cap, it’s a 10x slow. Slows are great because they also scale combat scripts… did you know Violence actually has an elastic amount of time before he drops the Violence Silence?

Bit more on augments now. Freeze Force is great, because it’s a straight buff to Viral. You are running Viral on the funny fullstrip frame, right? Right. Also a straight buff to corr/cold builds too. People running corr/heat pistols are going to hate you though… use with caution in pubbies.

Ice Wave Impedance is funny. It’s a separate slow effect to the Cold, so Frost can very nearly timestop targets with an 11x/40x slow depending on what their Cold cap is. While it’s often hard to justify keeping Ice Wave, it’s very nice to have when you want it. It’s on my Disruption and mobility builds (ditching Snow Globe). Another note is that it leaves multiple independent patches, so it’s somewhat resilient to Nullifier pulses. Very funny for bullying Acolytes too. Also, Ice Wave is huge so it leaves a massive area of funny.

Chilling Snow Globe… I know nothing about. I’ve never used it. I guess theoretically it would be nice if you wanted to farm Hieracon with Frost for some reason.

Icy Avalanche. Aw yeah. I recently dropped some red shards on Frost to make room for this, and it’s hard to go back. Ironskin for the whole party. No knockdowns. No poison. Mostly no energy drain. No death slashes. So good! And now that Overgating exists, everyone gets an extra 0.5s of oneshot immunity. Really adds to Frost’s already formidable support kit.

Biting Frost my beloved. This is a really good buff for Frost, and turns him into a powerful and versatile weapon wielder. 200% CC/CD opens up some really dumb things, like red crit Pax Seekers that hit in the millions, Stahlta oneshots, Corinth nukes, ridiculous Contagion nukes, Cyanex murderswarms, and so on. The sky is the limit when you’re playing inside Frost’s icy sandbox of slaughter. Frost just straight up has no bad weapons when you’re running this.

He has some nice midgame builds too. With high base EHP it’s very easy to make him into an umbra tank and comfortably go for a couple hundred levels.

If you’ve put Frost in cold storage, I can’t recommend enough pulling him out and giving him a spin. He’s been an absolute monster since the November 2021 buffs. I still hear people trash talking him, but it’s just not true. Sad case of Zephyr Syndrome, I think, given he was languishing for years as a niche frame.

Frost is one of the best early game defense frames, but unfortunately falls off pretty hard mid to late game. By mid game you’re usually better off bringing one of the heavy nuke frames as the saying about the best defense being a strong offense very much applies. Nobody can damage the objective if their dead 2 seconds after spawning in.

As for late game although Frost got the same 5 second damage absorb as Rhino and that helps quite a bit with scaling it just means his bubble will on average last about 10 seconds between recasts rather than just immediately vanishing. In terms of raw defense you’re probably better off with Limbo or Gara the former because his protection doesn’t rely on absorbing a specific amount of damage and the later because she has mechanisms that allow both her defense and offense to continue scaling. A strong CC frame along with a good nuke frame is almost always better at defending an objective late game compared to a defense focused one.

Even worse for poor Frost, he suffers from a severe mobility problem. His globes often represent a significant time and energy investment and being non-mobile strongly encourage him to pick one location and camp it. This can strongly discourage his use in any game mode that doesn’t have a stationary objective.

0verall I’d say he’s a great starting frame and is very easy to get up and running with minimal mods, but suffers from having a very specific niche and a severe lack of scaling.

Since the buff to his augment a few weeks ago Frost has become my favorite frame. I completely disagree with the people saying he isn’t endgame viable. I’ve run him in Steel Path, Archon hunts, and long SP circuit runs with level 1000+ enemies. The only real weakness frost has right now is damage, which is solved by having any sort of half decent gun or melee.

Frost’s first 3 abilities aren’t super useful. Though the dome can be okay for taking some heat off in defense. I replace his 2nd ability with Lavos’ movement ability to help frost’s movement issues. I choose lavos because it is the only helminth movement ability that doesn’t require duration, since my frost has 15% duration. The first ability is only useful for removing domes.

The key to frost’s strength is his 4th ability. This baby has it all (minus damage) His fourth ability has easily attained 100% armor strip, which works on eximus and certain bosses like jackal. With its augment it generates massive amounts of overguard for you and your teammates. And provides great CC by freezing or slowing enemies, the slow seeming to bypass nearly all kinds of immunities (you can slow nullies through their bubble for example.)

Edit: the slow/freeze is also nice for getting incarnon headshots more easily

Frost is a bit of a weird frame, where his original focus was more around being Defensive/Protecting Objectives has become less effective/relevant in more recent updates and has started to become fairly strong offensively.

Freeze is Frost’s first ability and it’s fairly flexible in how it can be used.

1. The first way to use it is directly hitting an enemy with it. If the enemy does not have Overguard/CC immunity, then it will be frozen in place.
2. The second way to use Freeze (currently bugged) is to aim it at the ground creating a marked zone which slows enemies walking through it. This is useful either in a choke point or around an objective where melee based units clump up.
3. The third way to use this ability is to pop Frost’s Snow Globe, this is mostly just useful in case you placed your Snow Globe in a way that it obstructs your weapons or is no longer needed, I don’t find the damage done by popping Snow Globe to be very useful.
4. Priming enemies with Cold Procs (+6 cold procs on regular enemies and caps at 4 cold procs on anything with Overguard) and Adding Cold damage to your weapons if you’re using the “Freeze Force” Augment (combines with elements on weapons so not always desirable).

Ice Wave is Frost’s second Ability and the Icy Wave Impedance Augment.

1. This ability casts in a narrow cone traveling along the ground. On its own this ability just adds +6 cold procs onto regular enemies hit, and is capped at 4 procs for enemies with Overguard/status resistance.
2. With the Icy Wave Impedance Augment, this ability becomes much more effective at slowing down enemies in a large area. The slow effect is the same as what Freeze would do if it were not currently bugged. Unlike the Freeze ability, Snow Globe, and Avalanche, this ability is not able to Freeze enemies (different status than cold) which is the actual Status that is required for Biting Frost to function.

Snow Globe

1. Snow Globe is Frost’s main ability for protecting objectives. While I like this ability for lower level content, I find with recent updates that this ability has really become less useful for protecting anything on top of how fast late game enemies tend to destroy it. If I’m modding for this ability, I usually sticking close to base range and sometimes even using Narrow Minded to make it even smaller so that there’s less of a chance for enemies to wander inside the Barrier, and also makes it much harder for a Nullifier to destroy your Snow Globe when walking into it. This also cuts down on how obstructive it can be to your weapons as you are not able to fire from the outside into your Snow Globe. Play around with range though, you may be more comfortable with a larger bubble than I am, and your other abilities do become less effective with reduced range.
2. Snow Globe will also push any non CC immune enemies away and briefly freeze them. You can also try the Chilling Globe Augment for a chance to freeze anything entering a snow globe, but I don’t really feel this is effective, outside of leaving a bubble to passively defend an excavator when recasting Snow Globe will force freeze anything in range already, and also overlaps with Avalanche.
   Unfortunately Eximus enemies and enemies with Overguard have really diminished the effectiveness of this ability, and defensive focused frames overall.

Avalanche and Icy Avalanche Augment

1. Avalanche has become a very strong ability with the recent updates to Armor Striping, Biting Frost Augment, and more recently, granting Overguard when using the Icy Avalanche Augment.
2. Avalanche hits a wide area around your warframe and strips armor additively, meaning you can more easily fully strip an enemy in fewer casts with less Power Strength. This is pretty minor for lower level content but makes a large difference in the amount of damage enemies take later on. Enemies hit are also Frozen which will give you an increase to Crit Chance and Crit Damage if you’re using the Biting Frost Augment.
3. If you run the Icy Avalanche Augment on Frost, you will be granted Overguard for every enemy hit by Avalanche. Overguard grants CC immunity to anyone that currently has it active (and for some reason immunity to Radiation even though that’s Friendly-Fire and not CC) and provides a brief “Shield Gate”. This is a fairly useful Augment for Defense Sorties with a Radiation modifier.
   Like Frost’s other abilities (besides Ice Wave), this adds +6 Cold procs to nearby enemies and up to 4 cold Procs on anything resistant to status.

Biting Frost This Augment provides +200% Crit Chance and Crit Damage to any enemies Frozen (additive to Point Strike/Vital Sense style mods). It’s unaffected by power strength. I consider this Augment to be fairly strong, especially because you will be hitting Frozen enemies which are essentially free headshots for even more damage. The only real downsides are energy management, and ineffectiveness against enemies that cannot be Frozen. It’s probably best to run an efficiency focused build, and look to running something like Exodia Brave or Energy Generator. If you’re far enough into the game for the Helminth, then Zenurik + Nourish also very strong for regenerating energy.

At the time of writing this, Frost Prime (and Mag Prime) are currently available from Prime Resurgence for another 120 days. You can exchange Aya with Varzia for some relics containing parts for either of these frames. Primes are not mandatory, they just have some minor stat buffs and look aesthetically different. If you don’t care for a Prime Frame then there’s nothing wrong with skipping it for something you’re more interested in.

Oh Frost, time was not kind to you! What was once a staple frame for nearly all defensive missions has had it’s job stolen first by Limbo and then by Gara (poor Limbo actually aged even WORSE than Frost somehow thanks to Eximus rework).
His 1st and 2nd abilities might as well not exist without their respective augments, Snow Globe is just a worse Mass Vitrify in 90% of cases and Avalance is a poor man’s CC with armor strip crippled by mediocre range and janky hit detection, yet it’s still his best ability.
To make him more relevant they really need to change Snow Globe to behave exactly as Mass Vitrify does, let ally fire pass through from BOTH sides, otherwise it’s just a hindrance more often than a benefit. 4 could use extra 5m of range baseline and make it hit enemies above and below him, not just on the exact vertical plane Frost happens to be.
His 1 needs a complete scrapping, a single target CC with travel time makes no sense in current Warframe.
2 could have potential if it’s augment was baked-in, it’s already required to make this ability do anything. In addition maybe make it continually apply frost procs as enemies move through the lingering zone and limit the max number of zones to 3-4 max to not make it too OP. CC is Warframe is weak enough as it is so giving Frost a better version of Hallowed Ground would probably be fine.

Is there any way to get Archon Flow work for him in high level play? I tried with Ice Wave and currently Thermal Sunder (heat then cold to try to kill with both blast and cold dmg at the same time), both of the abilities didn’t seem to be damaging enough to kill, even after Icy Avalanche. My build is currently sitting at 243% strength. Any thoughts?

Like I mentioned I like Frost, not quite enough that he makes my top 5, but enough that I’ll mention it twice.

I definitely think his kit can show its age nowadays, he really lacks some of the utility and mechanics that most new frames carry so he can feel basic if you’re more familiar with the new ones

That said I do feel like strength wise he isn’t in a bad spot, I think the Icy Avalanche rework really helped out as far as playing Frost defensively/support and I don’t think Frost himself is in desperate need for a rework

Also forgot, last weeks Warframe,Mag, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1423538