Best Cryo Freeze Augments in BO7 Zombies

Ice Cloud is the Major worth running on Cryo Freeze, with Liquid Nitrogen and Freezer Burn underneath it once Extra Slot is open. It is the one Major that keeps working on the rest of a train instead of the two or three enemies in front of you.

We researched the full grid to 100%, ran the build on Vandorn Farm past round 28, and checked every augment against the numbers Treyarch published in Season 03. Here is what held up, and where Cryo Freeze is the wrong mod to have equipped.

The Best Cryo Freeze Augment Build

Liquid Nitrogen raises how often the mod fires at all, and Freezer Burn cashes that in as damage against everything you have slowed. The two stack the same loop instead of bolting a side effect onto it, which is why they beat the other pairings.

Here is the thing though. Changing the Major on Cryo Freeze does not rework it the way swapping a Fire Works Major does. Each one nudges the same slow in a slightly different direction, so treat this as picking the best version of one effect rather than picking between four different mods.

What Cryo Freeze Actually Does

Treyarch’s line is short: “Bullets deal Frost damage. Each bullet has a chance to slow a Normal or Special Enemy and increase the damage they receive.” The slow is the point, and the extra damage everything takes while slowed is the reason it is not purely defensive. One tester puts that debuff at an extra 20% damage on frozen enemies, which is the only base figure anyone has published.

In our runs it activated often, close to every connecting shot on a normal enemy, and a good burst locked up most of a train at once rather than a couple of stragglers.

That last part matters. It never catches everything, and the enemies it misses keep coming at full speed, which is why users online complaint about the Cryo Freeze ammo mod.

How to Unlock Every Cryo Freeze Augment

Row one is Extension, Big Game and Freezer Burn. Row two is Frozen Stiff, Liquid Nitrogen and Ice Cloud. Row three is Thermal Shock, Cold Company and Extra Slot. Our Major and one of our Minors sit in the first two rows, so the useful part of this grid arrives early. The catch is Extra Slot: without that last node you run one Minor, not two.

Getting to 100% took a while for us and the Research screen did not climb fast. The Black Cell XP boost moved it more than anything we changed about how we played. A community spreadsheet puts the full tree at 525,000 cumulative XP, roughly 15.22 hours at 575 XP per minute. It is still the only published estimate, and the scale of it matched our experience.

Only one research project runs at a time, so putting Cryo Freeze first means everything else waits. You might want to wait however with starting research for Cryo Freeze. A perk like Jugger-Nog improves every run from the moment it lands and costs no Salvage on top.

All Major Augments for Cryo Freeze Ranked

Ice Cloud is the biggest impact augment on this mod and the other majors don’t come close. The cloud left behind slows whatever walks into it, so it works on a whole train instead of the five or eight enemies a single activation reaches.

Cold Company is the runner up and the Season 03 buffs earned it that. A 35% activation chance on a small radius catches groups, and in our games we saw about ten enemies affected at once. It loses to Ice Cloud because its effect ends when the activation ends, while a cloud keeps punishing the rest of the train.

Big Game exists for Elite enemies, which is a narrow job on a mod you are running for horde control. Frozen Stiff is the one to leave alone. It freezes enemies in place rather than slowing them, and in our runs it sometimes locked a couple in place while the rest kept coming. A Reddit player put the problem plainly a year ago and it still reads true: “frozen stiff will just freeze a zombie or 2 in place but won’t do much to the rest of the horde.” It would need to freeze reliably on most of a group to be worth a slot.

All Minor Augments for Cryo Freeze Ranked

Freezer Burn and Liquid Nitrogen is the pair, and running both at once needs Extra Slot. More activations and more damage per activation compound with each other, so this is the combination that makes the mod feel like it is contributing rather than just delaying things.

Thermal Shock is the interesting one, because Treyarch buffed it harder than anything else on this mod, from 20% to 50% damage, and it still shows up in almost no published builds. We can see why. Even post buff it softened enemies for us rather than taking anything down, so the damage arrives at the wrong moment: after the freeze wears off, when whatever is left is already on top of you. Extension is the safe pick nobody regrets and nobody notices, since a longer slow does not change how a fight goes.

When to Run a Different Ammo Mod

You get one Ammo Mod, so this section is the honest one. Cryo Freeze is not the mod that does the most damage to zombies, and we would not put it on our main weapon by default for that reason alone. We would rather use an Ammo Mod that can clear out hordes, instead of slowing hordes down.

The exception is elemental weakness. Uber Klaus and the Klaus Core take extra damage from frost, per a community weakness chart with 287 upvotes, and one tester notes Uber Klaus “takes more damage from cryofreeze, which I think has better utility” than the alternatives. That is the case where this mod is genuinely the right answer, though our own Uber Klaus fights felt less dramatic than that suggests.

Running a different build, or getting more out of Cold Company than we did? Come argue about it in our COD Central Discord, where 50,000+ members compare augment setups and high round runs.

Frequently Asked Questions