Incrasing your skills will allow you to land hits more often on higher level mobs, comes in handy for yellow to red con mobs.As for haste, I use that buff ALOT. Especially when soloing. It is great because it lets the tank do more dmg to help him hold aggro better and since casters do such good damage anyway I usually use this instead of the spell proc song because casters also dont need to get more hate than they already normally do.