Spell Change: Slow

[Egon the Monkey]

Stinking Cloud is brilliant against goblins, kobolds, anything that comes in hordes and has low fort saves. Several rounds of large area denial in the right quests. As a former player of a PC who always had half a dozen bags of Choking Dust to spam, I like that spell!

[The Beggar]

seems to be more useful than a -4 AC and -2 AB AND a loss of an attack round on offending creatures.

Different needs for different times. Haste shines in a boss scenario or against small number of higher level creatures, and when you have one kick ass person to put it on. Downside is-only buffs one person.

Slow is very, very, uber effective in controlling a mob of creatures as well as controlling a boss. Lower AC means more damage placed on target, and -4AC is huge. It also provides a debuff to damage output from the creatures in question, effectively buffing your whole party in the AoE for the duration. Numerically, slow is a much better spell by far than haste.