Anyone else find themselves missing the slag mechanic? I have been thinking about the game quite a bit. I was never really a fan of slag and thought cry would be a natural game mechanic but I am finding that cryo is really dumbing down the game for me. Especially melee gameplay. Sure…it is fun to robot punch a frozen enemy but I don’t think its a good alternative to slag. Maybe cryo should just slow things to a degree depending on power or skill points but freezing altogether feels pretty cheap.
I completely agree, slag was a great mechanic and cryo does not replace it well at all
I don’t miss slag one bit. Combining cryo with explosive is much more satisfying, and unlike slag, cryo is not essential at all. You don’t need to swap elements constantly.
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IMO slag was a poor design decision. I love the cryo element, it feels much more satisfying. My #1 elemental type.
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I never really liked slag, in fact I hated it so much I stopped using it on Krieg. Cryo is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t feel necessary. Maybe we play differently, but when I’m playing with my wife and a friend of ours, Ariella comes in mighty handy for my Clappy. 
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Cryo feels natural, where slag seemed forced.
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That’s a good destination between cryo and slag. Ice does appear in nature, where dlag doesn’t. For me it is another point of immersion - Hyperion created slang by refining Eridium for their experiments. eridium appears somewhat naturally in the Borderlands universe but like I said slang is a “forced” byproduct of the “forced” refining process.
I think the forced feeling of slag was a good decision on Geearbox’s part - I enjoy it.
I like Cryo too… Like you said, Power-fist is godly when enemies are frozen… But at least on NVHM and my 5-or-so levels in TVHM, there’s never been a legit need for it and many more weapons I’m finding just blow same-level cryo guns out of the water - both in terms of stats and usefulness.
At least there is a purpose for using cryo on top of cryo. Slag on slag was pointless. I much prefer cryo to “shoot until purple, then switch to another gun to do damage”.
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Both have their uses, and prefer to use both as least as possible.
They both only come into play for me when there’s a super badass around.
Unless you played as Sal…until uvhm I think. My TVHM play through builds always saw Sal with 2 slang pistols in the loadout along with Autoloader. Kill. Switch. Much fun.
@0takuMetalhead that is exactly how I view cryo.
Cryo is much more fun than slag imo.
It’s not necessary as you can play without it, but it’s still worth it to use. Turns enemies In to popsicles, and gives cool bonuses when the target is frozen,
Additional crit damage, X 3.50 melee damage, and 3X explosive damage.
All slag did was turn someone purple than made you swap to a nonslag gun for the X 3 bonus.
Dispite my previous comment, I have to say that Cryo spawned one of my favorite uniques: Too Scoopes. 2 out of 3 characters have it in case of said Super Badass, and when you know how it works it is a really great cryo tool.
Slag dependence is what made BL2 tedious for me. Magic missile and other good slag grenades alleviated that a bit, but overall I hated slag. Cryo is much better in my opinion. I like having the options to buff crit, melee, and explosions while not feeling like I HAVE to use them. for example, I almost never use cryo on athena or wilhelm and not often on jack because they don’t feel necessary.
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Cryo may not be perfect, but holy ■■■■ slag was bad.
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On the topic of slag.
I purposely avoided it as much as possible with my only character that I have on OP8, and still have good DPS.
I miss slag sometimes when I’m fighting a difficult boss (EOS <.<), but I like that cryo isn’t so necessary. Hats off to you guys playing without slag, but playing without cryo is less impactful. But playing with cryo is a lot more fun! Shame it doesn’t at least slow bosses, some are even immune to the status effect as far as I saw.
Kind of. I love the both equally. Slag, at it’s core, is a better mechanic. Having to rely on slag, is not fun. While cryo may be slightly more useful since enemies can’t move, it’s a little sad that I have to switch to explosive weapons for the bonus damage, especially since I use a lot of elemental weapons. But I don’t mind using explosive weapons cause I’ve got quite a few of those too. Still able to use those elemental weapons for easy critical hits once frozen.
I think slag is worse because you HAVE to switch around for it to be good. and you feel like you MUST to use it with certain playstyles. but cryo doesn’t seem like a requirement on anyone but aurelia and on her I don’t even switch weapons for most mobs, I just take the time to make sure all shots are head shots once they stop moving. I think if they wanted to balance cryo with other elements they could change freeze to a slow on all but a few legendary weapons, but let the dots trigger the same bonuses (like they do on bosses).
I love Cryo because its easier to use.
Basically mindless.
I had only ever used it to limited degrees before starting with Aurelia, but, if you get the right com, weapons, shield, etc, it becomes ridiculously OP (with the exception of against RK5 and the Sentinel).
With barely any effort on my part, large groups of enemies would just be exploding all around me.
Some people probably think that makes the game too easy; I personally love it.
I remember during one UVHM coop session with @acnaero he commented to me that “Cryo is too OP! It will probably be nurfed soon!”