Something I never quite understood...

I can tell you that slow is equally useful... or as equally useless as cold beam. Pap is so easy to pin in kb with 4th job, practically any 4th job character can pin it. Tengu moves so fast it feels almost the same as if it wasnt slowed. so comparing it to cold beam isnt very different to comparing to dropping shout. no cold beam means being forced to train on mobs till around late 10x where you have a decent 1v1 attack.

Slow is still more useful than Cold Beam. Something that gets used rarely will always be better than something that never gets used, especially when the thing that never gets used was never useful to begin with.

I concede that it's a bit less useful than it was before now, because Slow was particularly more useful pre-fourth when it was much harder to just pin it to the wall,, but you never know when Nexon'll release something else like Bigfoot where Slow can indeed be useful again.

As for the last bit of your comment... if you're not training on mobs after 7x, you're seriously doing something wrong. Especially if you're using CB at that level. Something horribly, horribly wrong.

As for dropping Shout... Shout actually has its uses, even if it's just using it while training in third job at Gobies, or spamming it at Leprechauns. You can alwyas find some use for utility skills like that, but when looking at CB, you'll really never use it again after you hit third job for anything other than freezing a single enemy until you get Comp, and even during second you won't be training with it. Just, again, using it to feeze, or unnecessarily picking off a single enemy once in a while that you could just lure with Claw and mob.