[2022] Another variation of the Forbidden Flame jewel can allocate Fury of Nature, a new Ranger Ascendancy Skill

Technically yes in that it can also help partially counter "less" modifiers* to the effect, not just "reduced".

It does not affect duration of the freeze in any way, and thus cannot help a freeze meet the minimum duration to be applied. Duration and effect are different things.

*So long as the less modifier has a value lower than 100%

have you played a freeze build?

I implemented a freeze calculation function, so I figure that's close enough.

Freeze always has a base magnitude of 100% less reduced action speed. Effect modifiers modify that value.

Damage does not affect freeze magnitude like it does for other ailments, it affects duration instead.

The only requirement to be able to freeze is that freeze duration is at least 0.3 seconds. This requires dealing a certain amount of damage, since that is what determines base freeze duration, but modifiers increasing the duraiton of freeze make it easier to reach that minimum.

Modifiers to effect don't help meet the minimum duration, because they change effect, not duration.

EDIT: I see from other posts the source of confusion may have been found in Bonechill, which makes enemies take increased damage based on the effect of chill on them. This means modifiers that boost the effect of chill will increase the damage those enemies take, and that will make it easier to freeze them (with subsequent hits) because them taking more (cold) damage from your hits means greater base freeze duration.

There are no modifiers that increase the effect of only freeze (because they'd be largely useless), so boosting the effect of freeze is generally going to be done with a modifier that also boosts the effect of chill, which if using Bonechill will have a knock-on effect that boosts freeze duration as descrbied above, but that's because of increasing chill effect, not freeze effect (and will stop at the maximum effect of chill, which is 30%)

No, we've come full circle on that.

Freeze was originally 100% reduced action speed (back in the day there were no more/less modifiers. It was a simpler time). And that was fine, because that would always fully stop things.

Then at some point we added something that could increase action speed, and it was no longer fine, because that let things move while frozen, which was unintended. So freeze changed to a magnitude of something like 200% reduced action speed, which solved the problem temporarily, but was never going to work long term.

Eventually as action speed modifiers became more complicated, freeze was changed to have a boolean effect which set action speed to 0, ignoring (most) other modifiers. As a boolean thing, this couldn't be scaled, which was fine, because freeze wasn't a thing that could be scaled anyway.

Some bosses got various forms of "action speed cannot be modified below X", shown as "cannot be fully slowed", which freeze did respect - it was still boolean, but would only lower them as close to 0 as it could get them. This let things move while frozen again, but that was fine because this time we meant to do it.

More recently, designers didn't like that investing in reducing the effect ailments had on you did nothing for freeze, so they wanted freeze to no longer be boolean, so you could scale the effect down and move a little if you wanted. But we didn't want to just go back to the original case where it was directly countered by increasing action speed, because that was easier than ever. So freeze changed again to have a base magnitude of 100% less action speed, which is multiplicative with other modifiers.

So that's where we are now, and why Aquamarine Flasks can work. Freeze has a fixed base magnitude of 100% less action speed, which by default will stop someone even with increased action speed on them, but effect modifiers can scale that value.

I'm not really sure, sorry. I would have to go digging through the revision history, and I don't have time for that. I think the change from boolean to less was in the same patch as the flask, but not 100% sure.