Frost has yet another augment to add to the pile, but it’s one that fans have wanted for a while. The Cold Front augment makes it so Frost’s Snow Globe attaches directly to him, rather than the shield being placed in a fixed location. Having Snow Globe move with you encourages a far more mobile playstyle, and you can become effectively invincible with the right mod pairings so long as you don’t stand still for too long.
Frost Build Guide
In this guide, I’ll show you how to build Frost to take full advantage of the increased mobility from Cold Front, while buffing the entire squad with the help of his other augments. Frost was already amazing at defending stationary targets, but with this build he excels at covering even moving ones, such as defense targets in Arbitrations, Archon Hunts, and Descendia. This build has been stress-tested in both Arbitrations and Steel Path, and is well capable of both. To follow this build to the letter, you’ll need at least 4 Forma on a new Frost.
What To Mod For
This build relies on quite a few augments, all of which you can get from Cephalon Suda’s syndicate shop at max rank for 25,000 standing each. The key to making Frost effectively invincible is combining Cold Front with Icy Avalanche, which gives you overguard when freezing enemies with Frost’s Avalanche ability. Your Snow Globe will protect you, and by extension your overguard, from standard ranged attacks, while the overguard protects you from things that slip through the bubble, like certain enemy abilities and area attacks. It’s a double layer of protection, especially since your Snowglobe regains health anytime you kill a frozen enemy, and Avalanche will be freezing enemies en masse. Otherwise, the Biting Frost augment synergizes well, since it gives you +200% critical chance and critical damage against frozen enemies. The Freeze Force augment is just nice in general, giving you and allies extra cold damage on weapon attacks that scales with power strength.
Beyond the augments, you’ll want to build for strength, duration, and range. Blind Rage, Primed Continuity, and Stretch cover that nicely, and the Growing Power aura gives you increased strength on demand so long as you have a status weapon. Otherwise, Archon Flow complements the build nicely, increasing your energy reserves and giving frozen enemies a 10% chance to drop an energy orb on death. Ice Spring is a bit of a niche mod, but it’s an additional 24.2% bonus added on to Cold Front’s 25% boost to parkour velocity, giving you insane mobility to take full advantage of Warframe’s amazing movement system. If you don’t care about mobility as much, treat it as a flex slot for your choice of mod. I had originally slotted Overextended in Ice Spring’s place to compensate for the reduced radius on Snow Globe from Cold Front, but I didn’t like the loss of strength that comes as a tradeoff.
Beyond The Mods
For Archon Shards, you’ll mostly want crimson shards to boost your strength higher, but I also slotted two azure ones for a bit of a boost to armor, since Icy Avalanche’s overguard generation scales with armor. That said, you could honestly go full crimson if you wanted, since overguard gained scales with strength as well. Beyond shards, there are a few Helminth abilities that work well for this build, but I found Rhino’s Roar subsumed over Icy Wave provides the most support to the squad as a whole. Roar boosts damage across the board for everyone, and will scale up nicely since we’re already building for power strength anyway, with this build capping out at around 99% bonus damage.
If you’d rather build for raw ability damage rather than damage buffs, you could always subsume Wisp’s Breach Surge instead of Roar, especially if you plan to swap out Ice Spring for increased range. Breach Surge pairs nicely with Avalanche, causing enemies damaged by Avalanche’s area-of-effect to propagate additional AOE damage from Breach Surge. Whatever subsume you decide on, this build is quite energy-hungry thanks to Blind Rage’s efficiency loss, but Arcane Energize and Archon Flow help offset that since the energy orbs generated by Archon Flow will trigger Energize’s energy boost. Otherwise, Molt Augmented is great for the second slot, for an extra 60% power strength at max stacks to really boost the buffs from Roar and Freeze Force.
The Gameplay Loop
At the start of a mission, you’ll have just enough energy to cast Snow Globe or Freeze, but I find Snow Globe to be more useful, since a single cast can last the entire mission so long as you keep its health topped up. As with all abilities that scale with strength, though, you’ll want to inflict a weapon status effect to trigger Growing Power’s strength increase before casting it, while occasionally recasting as your strength increases with Molt Augmented stacks. At the first dense group of enemies you find, it helps to cast Avalanche for a good bit of overguard, while repeating the process until you hit the overguard cap or need to replenish. From then on, your main focus will be keeping the buffs from Freeze Force and Roar active for peak squad DPS. One last thing worth noting about the mobile Snow Globe is that it can be used as a shield during transference, which helps during modes like Void Cascade or Conjunction Survival where certain enemies can only be taken out by amps.
Just starting Warframe, or back after a break? Check out our article on the Iceblade of Narin update! Interested in more of my build-crafting? Give Vauban a try! We encourage you to comment below with any questions regarding the Mods, Arcanes, or various tips in this guide. Keep checking GameObserver for more Warframe guides and news!
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