Something I never quite understood...

Er, actually, dropping Cold Beam in favour of slow is by far the preferred build now. Cold Beam having more than the required end-of-job points is absolutely useless in the scheme of things, due to more than one point in it not having anything to do with the length of freezing and due to the fact that none of the best training areas make use of maxed Cold Beam, either. Slow on the other hand, works on non-immobile bosses. Now which sounds more appealing to you?

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.