Cold Arrow
The range of Cold Arrow's missiles is just 44 "terrain tiles," or just about 15 yards. Normal attack and most other amazon bow and crossbow skills can reach almost twice as far, and even damage off-screen enemies. CA converts a percentage of the weapon's physical damage to cold damage (3% at skill level 1, 33% at skill level 16) and adds cold damage and chill length that also scales with skill level (3-4 and 4 seconds at skill level 1, 37-38 and 22 seconds at skill level 16). Each point invested in Ice Arrow adds 12% to the scaling cold damage.
It appears that this skill has always been used either as a prerequisite or as a synergy to increase Freezing Arrow's damage.
Some act 1 mercenaries can use this skill. If there was a character that appeared to have used Cold Arrow as a late game skill, I didn't find it. This might be a fun "Cold Rogue wannabe" challenge, to max Cold Arrow (and its synergy), and try to defeat Hell difficulty Ball with it.
Ice Arrow
Three uses for Ice Arrow: actually use it to damage and briefly freeze an individual foe, put a point in it to increase Cold Arrow's damage, or put a point in it to increase Freezing Arrow's freeze duration by a frame or two. (Um, well, in Hell difficulty, a point in Ice Arrow lengthens FA's freeze time by slightly
less than one animation frame!)
Each skill level accelerates cold damage and inceases freeze duration. Examples: 6-10 for 2 seconds at level 1, 60-65 for 3.6 seconds at 9, 144-156 for 5 seconds at 16, 234-251 for 6 seconds at 21. I think the freeze lengths might be reduced 50% in nightmare and 75% in hell difficulty.
Glacier by
PhineasB maxed all three Amazon cold skills in a bid to get the highest possible effects out of her 'Ice' runeword bow.
(There was also a report of maxed Ice Arrow in
Russell.s' write-up for Guardian
Dosmingo, but to be honest, it seemed like a typo or unintended mistake. Like most of the other "
Fishyzon" variants in the compilation, I suspect it's more likely that Dosmingo actually maxed Cold Arrow for its FA damage synergy, rather than Ice Arrow for it's minuscule freeze duration synergy. Nevertheless, that's merely a minor quibble - it was still rather exciting to read about Dosmingo's epic battle against the Ancients.)
Dec 2022 Update: New interesting Ice Arrow build:
Grisu's hybrid tournament guardian
Pynache.
Freezing Arrow
At skill level 1, Freezing Arrow depletes 9 mana, adds 40-50 cold damage to all enemies 5 to 7 terrain tiles away from the target, and freezes them for two seconds. At skill level 23, the cold damage is 350-360 and mana cost is 20. Freeze length is reduced to 1 second in nightmare and 1/2 second in hell difficulty. Each point invested in Cold Arrow boosts cold damage a whopping 12%, and each point in Ice Arrow adds a tiny bit of freeze duration.
The most powerful Amazon cold skill turns out to be the most popular bow/crossbow skill in the compilation. I've been stashing all of the "cold damage" small charms identified so far. The write-ups all seem to agree that those charms are way better than the Ice Arrow synergy for pumping up this skill's freeze duration, so I look forward to trying them out as "twinkie charms" on a Freezing Arrow amazon someday.
I guess the guardian I choose to highlight here is actually the one that
didn't quite max the skill before achieving guardian status. When building another Fishyzon variant with
ElJuago, HP_Sauce put some points in Valkyrie, and then kept Charged Strike and Freezing Arrow "evenly powered" as she progressed through the game. By the time Hell Ball went down, those two skills were both still two levels shy of getting maxed.
Update, July 2021: since I first posted this,
maxicek posted an interesting Freezing Arrow specialist. Together with five other SPF players, in a game where every character used class-specific sets, maxicek successfully matted a M'Avina's bowazon named
Antiope.
Dec 2022 Update: Freezing Arrow's scaling mana cost was decreased in the
D2R 2.4 patch. Also, Act 1 Rogue "cold" Mercenaries now sometimes use the Freezing Arrow skill. New Freezing Arrow builds: 1.11 javelin hybrid
Meryl by
SerDash and strafer
Kelthra by
Crudesash68.
(edited to correct spelling)
[Update: new histograms, matriarch]
[2022 Dec Update: new histograms, skill details, D2R notes]