Diablo – What abilities allow you to break control impairing effects and other conditions

• Snared: Your character is slowed down. The magnitude of the slow effect varies depending on what's doing the snaring.

• Rooted: Unable to move from your current position.

• Attack Slowed: You swing your weapons more slowly.

• Chilled: Snared + Attack Slowed

• Frozen: Mostly the same as stunned, but certain skills, like the Wizard's Frost Nova's Shatter Rune, cause frozen enemies to behave differently. Frozen enemies leave no corpse.

• Immune: Immune to whatever status effect you're trying to apply. This can be knockback, stun, snared, or any other status effect, depending on the individual in question. Bottom line - one or more of your status effects isn't "sticking", so to speak. Unlike Diablo II, no monster in Diablo III is supposed to be immune to a damage type (though they might have high resistances).

• Knockback: Physically moves the target away from the origin of the attack.

• Stunned: Rooted, and unable to attack.

• Charmed: Fight other monsters instead of the player

• Feared: Running in fear, unable to take action or control direction of movement.

Unlike in Diablo II, on-hit elemental damage is simply that - bonus damage, with the sole exception of cold damage (which has a small snare). Frost damage does a little less damage comparatively because of this.

While there was originally a more complex critical hit system (as documented below), that functionality did not make it to the final game.

Critical hits just add damage.

Historical Answer:

More interestingly, in the Diablo III Beta, each type of damage has a different effect on a critical.

• Physical: Double Damage

• Arcane: Silences targets for 4 seconds (prevents abilities)

• Cold: Freezes targets for 2 seconds (Duration can be affected by talents, etc.)

• Fire: Sets them on fire, fire DoT (tick rate scales off weapon speed)

• Lightning: Stuns targets for 2 seconds (Duration can be affected by talents, etc.)

Poison and Holy presumably have effects on a critical hit also, but I haven't been able to find info on them.