  The recently introduced swampland criterion for de Sitter (arXiv:1806.08362)
can be viewed as a (hierarchically large) bound on the smallness of the slow
roll parameter $\epsilon_V$. This leads us to consider the other slow roll
parameter $\eta_V$ more closely, and we are lead to conjecture that the bound
is not necessarily on $\epsilon_V$, but on slow roll itself. A natural
refinement of the de Sitter swampland conjecture is therefore that slow roll is
violated at ${\cal O}(1)$ in Planck units in any UV complete theory. A
corollary is that $\epsilon_V$ need not necessarily be ${\cal O}(1)$, if
$\eta_V \lesssim -{\cal O}(1)$ holds. We consider various tachyonic tree level
constructions of de Sitter in IIA/IIB string theory (as well as closely related
models of inflation), which superficially violate arXiv:1806.08362, and show
that they are consistent with this refined version of the bound. The phrasing
in terms of slow roll makes it plausible why both versions of the conjecture
run into trouble when the number of e-folds during inflation is high. We
speculate that one way to evade the bound could be to have a large number of
fields, like in $N$-flation.
