Cold Mastery question + Frozen or Shiver Armor?

[Borg1982]

COLD MASTERY:

I'm looking at an old thread that states level 17 means you are at -100% resist to cold for enemies, so am I to understand that having 16 or less into it makes it useless until you get to 17? Is the end-all be-all of CM to focus on getting 17 into it?

FROZEN / SHIVER ARMOR:

I'm looking at a skill tree calc that states the Frozen Armor defense bonus at level 25 is 150% and it freezes enemies for 7 seconds... but the Shiver Armor bonus at that level is 189% and it says "Cold Length 4 seconds". Does cold length mean frozen length or just moving-slower? Where is the frozen length on Shiver if it claims to freeze enemies?

OVERALL: What is your recommendation on the two armors... and what is your final opinion on what to do with CM???

Thanks.

Edit: Not to say I'd ever max armor! 1 point is fine.

[zaphodbrx]

Cold mastery gives -5% to enemy cold resistance per level. If a monster has 0 cold res, it will go up to -100 coldres with lvl 17 CM, which is the cap.
If monster has more than 0 cold res ( but not immune ), then having CM > lvl 17 will help.
And yes, it will still help if it is less than 16 points in cold mastery.

About the armors, I think shiver is best, but at 1 point, it won't really matter.

[hubb]

IIRC Frozen armor freezes enemies solid once they've hit you, while Freezing armor can slow them while they're swinging. That can apparently mean the difference between being hit or not when you teleport through a pack so Freezing armour is usually recommend.

People often say to aim for level 17, but as zaph said if monsters have cold res above 0 (many in Hell do) then CM won't get their resists to -100%. On dual-tree Orb builds level 17 is good to aim for, on pure cold sorcs I aim for 23-27. CM is definitely not useless before you get it to level 17, it's in fact the first couple of levels that count the most

[Borg1982]

IIRC Frozen armor freezes enemies solid once they've hit you, while Freezing armor can slow them while they're swinging. That can apparently mean the difference between being hit or not when you teleport through a pack so Freezing armour is usually recommend.

People often say to aim for level 17, but as zaph said if monsters have cold res above 0 (many in Hell do) then CM won't get their resists to -100%. On dual-tree Orb builds level 17 is good to aim for, on pure cold sorcs I aim for 23-27. CM is definitely not useless before you get it to level 17, it's in fact the first couple of levels that count the most

Hubb, do you mean Shiver armor is recommended?

[hubb]

Yes, there's no such thing as freezing armor *oops*