Sephiria Glacier Combo: Cold Damage and Frostbite

Glacier is the cold tag, and it is the clearest example in Sephiria of a combo that does nothing until something else in your bag is dealing the right damage type. Two artifacts that reward Frostbite are two dead artifacts if nothing you own applies Frostbite. That dependency is the whole reason one documented build spends a Wish Fountain slot on a ring that deals no damage at all.

The general tag rules are on the combo system page, and the single-table version of these picks is in the combo tags cross-index.

Threshold: two

Glacier sits at two artifacts in the one published threshold list this site holds, alongside Guardian, Shadow, Magitech, Ember and Elemental. Placement is irrelevant to the count; the artifacts simply have to be in the bag rather than parked in the Side Bag, which is inactive.

The artifacts

The tier 50 author lists the first three as good rather than mandatory, which is an honest reading of a support tag: Glacier is what a defensive build takes because it is already holding cold, not the reason it starts holding cold.

The enabler problem, and the cheapest solution

The tier 50 evasion tank carries two artifacts in through the Wish Fountain, and one of them — the Frostium Ring — exists purely to deal the cold damage that switches the Glacier artifacts on. The site's Wish Fountain page generalises that into a rule worth stealing: carry the enabler, not the damage. An enabler does nothing by itself and makes a whole family of artifacts live, and it also biases the drop pool toward the tag you want, because artifacts in the bag raise the chance of their own tag being offered.

That is the cheap version. The expensive version is a weapon line.

The weapon lines that produce cold

Three of them are documented on this site:

• Sword & Shield — the Frost Shard branch splits into Glacial Blade and Blizzard's Eve, and the sword & shield guide names it as the reason the starting weapon pairs naturally with the Glacier artifact family.
• Crossbow — the Frost Veil and Rapid Freeze Crystal upgrades apply cold at range. The crossbow guide points readers to the damage types page for how cold becomes Frostbite as a status; checked directly, that page does not actually document Frostbite's mechanics, so how cold converts to the status is not confirmed anywhere this site can cite.
• Sword & Shield, again — Guillotine of Bitter Cold, which carries a naming trap: its interface labelled the skill "Blizzard Hammer" until patch 1.0.21, and Blizzard Hammer is also the name of an unrelated artifact. Older posts using that name may mean either.

One more source worth knowing: the Charm of Intelligence runs 3 / 4 / 6 / 8 Ice damage across its levels, one of the few artifacts whose per-level array this site can quote.

Eternal Winter was rebased, and old lists have not caught up

Eternal Winter connects Sturdy and Glacier, and patch 1.0.19 rewrote what it scales from. Its physical coefficient dropped from 72 / 130 / 230 to 40 / 75 / 125, and the artifact was rebased on 50% of Cold damage — recorded on the 1.0.19–1.0.24 patch page.

Read the two halves together. Before the change it was a physical artifact that happened to carry Glacier; after it, a bag with no cold source gets a cut-down physical artifact and nothing else, while a bag with a Frostium Ring or a Frost Shard weapon gets the version the tier 50 guide calls very high damage. It is the single best argument on this page for treating Sturdy and Glacier as one decision rather than two.

Frostbite as a trigger for other tags

Cold is not only its own damage. The tier 50 build applies Frostbite often enough that Scrap of Red Cloth, a Curse-tag artifact, earns its percentage bonus — so the Glacier half of that bag is quietly paying a third tag. On the Companion side, an Early Access Japanese guide names Heita's Soul Powder, a Frostbite-applying ice companion it calls the only stun available; those values have never been reconfirmed for 1.0 and should be read as historical.

The lesson generalises past this tag: status-applying artifacts are worth more than their own numbers, because other artifacts read the status.

The August patch that touched cold

One entry in the 1.0.25 to 1.0.30 window is relevant, and it is a real capability change rather than a fix: 1.0.30 gave Frozen Bow arrows the ability to pass through walls, which TEAM HORAY marked as community-requested. If your cold source is that bow, its behaviour in corridors changed in August. No Glacier artifact has been rebalanced since 1.0.19.

Not confirmed

No effect values are published for Echo of the Glacier, Feet of the Ice Gull or Snow Mountain Long-eared Bat, and this site holds no statement describing how Frostbite is applied, how long it lasts, or whether it stacks. Whether the Cold stat and Ice damage are one stat under two labels is not documented either — the artifacts above are described using both words by different sources. Glacier's own threshold figure comes from a single player's build rather than from the developer.

Sources checked for this page

• This site's combo effects page — the threshold of 2 and the Side Bag rule
• This site's tier 50 evasion tank and Wish Fountain carry-ins pages — the Glacier picks, the Frostium Ring and the Scrap of Red Cloth interaction
• This site's 1.0.19–1.0.24 patch notes — Eternal Winter's coefficient cut and cold rebase
• This site's sword & shield, crossbow and all weapons pages — the Frost Shard, Frost Veil and Guillotine of Bitter Cold lines
• This site's damage types, artifacts and tablets and combo tags cross-index pages