The question about the haste gear concerns me a little. I'm hoping the answer to it was a just shrug off. Its up to the dev team to figure out the balance, but there still needs to be items in the game that some people will just never obtain. If you wanna say that XI's pre-cakewalk days were too hardcore then fine, and I understand that they're trying to attract more players by making accomplishments easy to come by, but there still needs to be some form of ...social hierarchy...for lack of a better term.