Frost Rune: Slow, Burst and Slots

What this page helps you decide: whether to give your body armour slot to Frost or to a damage-over-time rune.

Frost is the only rune with two separate payloads. On hit it has a chance to apply the Frost status, which slows the target for a short time, and when that status expires it deals a further burst of damage. Chance, duration and the size of the closing hit all scale with rune level, and as with every rune in this game none of those three has a published value. Frost is described as the effect endgame players tend to favour, which is a control argument rather than a damage one: a slowed enemy is an enemy that lands fewer hits on you. It also has a specific interaction worth building around, because the closing burst is damage from a source, and Corrode raises damage taken from all sources. Frost and Corrode therefore multiply each other in a way that two damage-over-time runes do not.

The Corrode interaction, spelled out

Corrode is described as weakening the target so that it takes increased damage from all sources for a period. Frost ends its slow with a discrete hit of damage. That hit is a source like any other, so it lands inside Corrode's window at the increased rate if the timing lines up. This is the only documented interaction between two runes in the whole system, and it is the reason the recommended endgame layout is not simply three copies of the strongest rune. It also explains why Frost is described as the endgame favourite despite damage-over-time runes being rated higher early: Frost gets better when the rest of your build gets better, and the two damage-over-time runes do not.

What three slots of Frost would actually buy

Because the slot shares are flat percentages, you can price a full set without knowing any hidden numbers. Three copies of the same rune across weapon, body and helmet return 100 plus 60 plus 40 percent, which is 2.0 times a single weapon-slot copy, for three times the gold. At rune level 5 that is 21,600 gold for double the effect of one 7,200 gold enchant. Whether that is worth it depends on whether the effect stacks at all, and for Frost no source says either way. What is documented is that Corrode does not stack and that damage-over-time runes maintain one instance each, so assuming Frost stacks cleanly is a guess. We would put the second Frost on the body slot and spend the helmet on Corrode, which is what the wiki recommends anyway.

Two things the sources get wrong about the rune list

One popular guide site lists three runes rather than four, dropping Methysis entirely and renaming Corrode to Corrosion. It also declines to publish proc rates on the grounds that the stacking formula is unstable, which is at least honest. A second wiki page calls Burn by the name Fire. Between them, a reader working from those two pages would come away with the wrong count, one wrong name and one missing rune. The rune template and the item list on the two wikis agree on four runes with the names Burn, Frost, Corrode and Methysis, and we follow that. Frost is the one name that nobody disputes, which is a small mercy in a game where two of the four have alternate spellings in circulation.

Step-by-Step

1. Give Frost the body armour slot in an endgame layout. The published recommendation is Corrode on both the weapon and the helmet, with Frost or Burn on the body.
2. Pair it with Corrode rather than with another Frost. The closing burst is amplified by Corrode's damage-taken increase, so the two runes reinforce each other.
3. Do not expect the slow to do the work early. The same page rates damage-over-time runes above Frost during the opening phase, when raw survival matters less than clear speed.
4. Remember the body slot returns 60 percent of the rolled value for the same gold as the weapon slot, so a strong Frost roll is worth more on the weapon if control is not your problem.
5. Buy at level 3 from the grocery if you need one quickly: Frost 3 appears on Torgar's shelf at around 3,000 gold, with a stock of one in the snapshot we read.

Data Tables

All four effect descriptions and stacking rules are from the rune page, last edited 2026-07-29. The scaling column is our reading of those descriptions rather than a quote.

Value multiples come from adding the published slot shares of 100, 60 and 40 percent. Gold costs are the enchanting ladder multiplied out. Whether the effects themselves stack is not published for Frost.

FAQ