Borderlands Sirens and Playthrough 2

I've been spending most of my free time playing Borderlands as opposed to playing LOTRO or anything else the past while.

E had gone forward and left my co-op soldier behind on the main quest, so I switched to using my singleplayer Siren for all the games. The Siren wasn't as good as the soldier at first, since the special ability is not terribly good for offense. Sure it has a phase blast on entering and a 2nd one on exiting, but they aren't really enough damage to do any serious killing at the beginning, plus you have to get to that dangerous close melee range. Plus I kept running out of ammo since SMGs burn ammo so quickly. (Crits are not something you rely on when you use a stuttering jerky weapon like an SMG)

After about L25 or so, she suddenly got very tough. There's a few reasons for this:

finding a few good elemental SMGs such as a 3.7x zoom super accurate Spy corrosive SMG. I used it even in most situations where I would have switched to a sniper rifle. I understand why SMGs have scopes on them now, it was hard to see this when I just started playing and didn't have a +67% acc proficiency bonus yet.


a Mercenary Class Mod that allowed some SMG ammo regen - the reason I liked the Solider Support Gunner mod so much. Suddenly the ~1000 SMG ammo capacity was no longer a restrictive limit, since I could regenerate more. I no longer needed to keep a couple of different secondary weapons for when I ran out of SMG ammo, so I could focus on just using SMG and improving the skill on it.

Mind Games, the Siren power in the Controller Tree. This power, at 3 points, gives a 15% chance per bullet to seriously slow the enemy move rate, and fire rate. With an SMG's high rate of fire, that 15% happens every burst I shoot. A lot of tough foes are reduced to the speed and response time of an old shuffling zombie. BTW, even the enemy bullet speed is affected, and the end results is rockets slowly cruising through the air and bullets flying in slo-mo bullet-time, haha!


The Phase Blast has actually gotten to a useful state, since it recharges in 15sec, less a second per enemy killed, and has some elemental mods in it. I can actually use it to kill swarms of small stuff.

Currently at L40 and climbing. I started the second playthrough, and in about 2 or 3 hours, I went through from the first shoot 5 skags quest to cakking Mad Mel in the Dahl Headlands. It progresses a heck of a lot faster than the 1st time through due to the extra firepower and support abilities. For example, the enemy runner cars used to be really tough if you where on foot, and a pretty tough fight car-to-car, but now I just hop out of the car and mow them down with just a couple clips from the SMG.

I'll see how far I can get and how fast, with just the main quest on this playthrough.

Upsen.

p.s. the game's forums mention that large characters like Brick are easier to hit and small characters like the Siren are harder to hit. Realistic but sort of unfair for the bigger characters? I dont know if there are different base amounts of HP etc.