Can someone explain Cold Snap for me?

A fun little link I always enjoyed having in any build that ran dual Doryani's Catalysts was to put CS-lv20CwDT-penetration on one of them. With those items and links, you don't need to focus on spell damage to freeze everything occasionally.

I wonder what CS builds have been enabled through Ascendancy though. Maybe Assassi's low opportunity cost crit capping can make Volls-based crit casters less glassy.

I had a build in HC i think in invasion that used that as main skill and was doing fairly great

Shame i died and deleted the standard character (as all my dead characters after all)

It had like 6k life and good damage/AOE

Now Cold snap has:

16 base radius
462–693 cold damage at level 20 (577 average) a little bit more than arctic breath
30% fixed chance to freeze

It should be used in a +2 cold gem staff to get the most DPS boost

Also, with 20% qual, increased AOE gem and 15% AOE from tree the radius is boosted to roughly 26 which is a little less than ice nova base range

With the following links and a romira:

Cold snap + Cold pen + spell echo + controlled dest + inc AoE

It could be usable, probably not that strong but definitely usable

I happen to have a vaal cold snap which always freezes.
That sounds like a fantastic principle, but I'm not sure if it's worth pursuing. Thoughts?

Cold Snap value lies in its built-in freeze chance. Ive used it couple of times as a high level cwdt skill (with proliferation ofc) with my casters

As a main skill, Ive used it once with romiras in a hybrid summoner build

If you want self-cast just use vortex, GGG cant into balance.

You can even run frostbolt unlinked for some situations