Is Time Freeze Skill In Path Of Exile 2 A Complete Game-Changer?

Time Freeze Skill

As we all know, the complex and varied skill tree in Path of Exile has always been fascinating to many players, as it not only allows players to customize their own play style freely but also satisfies players’ desire for challenges. Among them, Skill Effect Duration is a somewhat troublesome stat in POE 1, which is why the passive skill tree allows players to have extremely limited access to it.

Skill Effect Duration Wheels

In POE 2, players still have difficulty getting a lot of this stat. However, for now, the situation is completely different, because the skill effect durations throughout the tree have been increased a lot, such as:

  • Protraction wheel: Increases skill effect duration by 10/20/40%.
  • Tides of Change wheel: Increases skill effect duration by 10/20/45%.
  • Chronomancy wheel: Increases skill effect duration by 10/20/40%.
  • Lingering Horror wheel: Can increase some chaos damage and skill effect duration by 25%.
  • Preservation wheel: Increases skill effect duration by 10/20/45%.

For the five wheels just discussed, these add up to a 190% increase in skill effect duration. While it may seem like you don’t need to invest more POE2 Currency to get more effect buffs, there are actually a lot of skills that are completely broken by this stat, one of which is Time Freeze.

Time Freeze

Time Freeze is an ability from Chronomancer ascendancy class, and what it does is that when you use this skill, a huge Area of Effect around you is frozen. This means that any monsters within this radius are basically frozen in time. They are in a stun-like effect, but it is not considered a stun or freeze. It is a separate effect, and the boss is basically in a stun state for the duration of Time Freeze.

Now, the base duration of Time Freeze is 3 seconds. But as we mentioned before, this is completely broken by the skill effect duration, and other factors that affect this will also affect it.

Factors That Affect Skill Effect Duration

Jewelry

One place you can get skill effect duration is Jewels. You can use it on any character to increase the duration of skill effects by 15%. Of course, you also have the option to roll its affixes for even more duration by utilizing POE 2 Chaos Orbs.

Let’s say you have all five wheels we just discussed, which increases the duration of skill effects by 190%. Then you have five slots that each increase the duration of skill effects by 15%, which would increase the 3-second Time Freeze to 10.95 seconds. So every time you use Time Freeze, the boss will be stunned for nearly 11 seconds.

Honestly, that’s pretty good, but there’s more. Because there’s also Persistent support, skill effect duration can be increased by 40%. This is a multiplier, so it would be 10.95 seconds times 1.4, which gives you 15.33 seconds of Time Freeze, which is ridiculous! Freezing a boss for 15 seconds is more than enough time for you to be able to blast away with whatever damage you use.

Temporal Chains

But it doesn’t stop there. Because Time Freeze is a debuff that applies to all monsters in a radius, that means it is affected by Temporal Chains.

Temporal Chains is a curse that does something like slow down monsters. At the same time, it also has the effect of slowing down the expiration of Persistent effects on the target, and you can also increase this by applying POE 2 Exalted Orbs.

Path Of Exile 2 Temporal Chains

Additionally, there is a wheel that increases the effect of the curse by 6% per small node and 18% per large node, for a total of 36% more effect. Then you also get 10% more effect from Quality stat of Temporal Chains, and another 25% from Heightened Curse.

Now combined, the effect of the curse is increased by 71%, which brings the expiration slowdown modifier to 43%, which means the duration of Time Freeze will go from 15.33 to 26.89 seconds. This is insane! Once the curse is on the target, they are doomed. This all makes Time Freeze skill completely unbalanced.

Time Freeze Modifier

There is an interesting line with Time Freeze modifier, though, which states that Time Freeze duration is halved for each time the affected enemy has been frozen in the last 30 seconds. This modifier was put specifically on this skill to stop party games from permanently freezing the boss.

We’re not sure if this means that when the target is actually frozen at the moment, the skill is cast. That counts as the time they were frozen. Or, it’s a continuous thing that tracks the entire time they were frozen. For example, when you cast Time Freeze, that’s the indicated time the monster was frozen, and then the 30 seconds counts from that time.

Time Snap

Characters who specialize in Time Freeze can also go down the right side of the passive tree and grab Time Snap to achieve the goal of permanently freezing the boss, though.

Time Snap is a skill that completely resets the cooldown of all your other skills when you use it. When this skill reaches level 20, it has a cooldown of 32.4 seconds. However, you can get a 22% cooldown reduction on the small node, which will reduce the cooldown of this skill to 26 and a half seconds at level 20. This means that if you time it correctly, you can actually freeze a boss permanently.

Path Of Exile 2 Time Snap

Although, as mentioned before, we are not sure whether this is actually working this way without multiple repeated tests; it is definitely a possibility that you can freeze a boss almost permanently every time. This means that you can almost kill a boss unscathed in a few seconds and become the biggest winner in the fierce battle to get the most POE 2 Currency!

In short, the change in the duration of the skill effect in POE 2 Early Access makes Time Freeze a complete game changer, but the fate of such a powerful skill effect is to be constantly weakened to ensure game balance. In any case, whether the powerful effect of Time Freeze destroys the game and what changes GGG will make to it, we still need to wait for the release of the full game of Path of Exile 2. Let’s wait and see!

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