Due to popular request, we've put together a full set of charts that show skill usage data for each game of the finals matches of the Guild Wars Factions Championship. Each chart shows the team rosters with each player's skills, and shows which skills were executed and which failed to execute due to interruption, cancellation, or recharge. Find the charts here.

http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/gwfc/skillusage/

Wow - I never noticed this info before. Interesting that Ether Prodigy was the most widely slotted elite!

I guess I was headed in the right direction when I was using it, and went in the wrong direction when I got bored of it :P

I've found it is one of the best elites for Elementalists. As long as you keep casting, you don't have to worry about the damage at the end of it. Also, you can always keep it up if you pay attention.

Ether Prodigy is free energy regeneration if you cast as fast as heck :P

Skill choices are not that simple. What works well for one person may not work well for another. Builds are highly dependent on a given player's physical strengths. People with fast reflexes can make a given build (i.e. interrupt mesmer) really effective, whereas people with slower reflexes may be better at something that isn't as frantic (echo nuker, maybe). Those guys in the championship games have awesome reflexes, or they wouldn't have gotten there.

That having been said, I think that Ether Prodigy would only be effective in certain situations.

The pros:
+4 energy regen

The cons:
Lose all enchantments
Exhaustion
Take 2 points of damage for every point of energy remaining when the spell wears off.

So you have to run a build that requires no enchantments and consumes a great deal of energy. Although, I suppose you can get away without the latter if you have a really good monk.

Alternately, this sounds ideal if you're planning to go up against energy denial/enchantment stripping mesmers. Given some of the other builds I saw, it's safe to say that this is the norm in the tournaments.

I don't know that I'd want to use it for PvE or 4 on 4, though. I'm just not impressed by the cost/benefit ratio.

I can definitely relate to the speed issue having played an infuser many times against spike teams - lol.

Looking at the usage of Ether Prodigy though I wonder if speed is that much of an issue. Take a look at Idiot Savants and the El/Mo who used Ether Prodigy 63 times and Heal Party 148 times. Although casting quickly is a requirement the difficulty appears to be mitigated somewhat by using a party wide spell.

Sorry for the confusion. Maybe I should have left the speed portion out of that discussion. I was just using that to point out that different people do better with different builds. People with fast reflexes, for example, make pretty good mesmers.

I agree that Ether Prodigy has nothing to do with speed. My theory is that it's a counter against mesmers. They can deny energy and strip enchantments all day long, but Ether Prodigy will always ensure that your ele stays in the game. My guess is that Ether Prodigy is a must-have in tournament play. Just look at WM's mesmer's skill bar in game 1 of the finals. Energy Denial: Energy Surge, Energy Burn, Power Return + Enchantment Stripping: Drain Enchantment, Shatter Enchantment. Ether Prodigy is a great counter to that. You're always deliberately low on energy, so that makes Energy Surge and Energy Burn pretty worthless. You're obviously not going to rely on enchantments (given that Ether Prodigy will strip them anyways), so that makes the Drain Enchantment and Shatter Enchantment useless too. With that one skill, you've made 5/8 of the mesmer's bar irrelevant.

For PvE and/or Team Arenas, I'm not so sure. I've never had problems with energy management in those environments, so I can think of many other elites that I would rather use that don't require me to lose all enchantments or take exhaustion. That was really my point. Illidan seemed down because he "got bored" of the skill, but it may just not have been useful in his particular situation. Another prevalent example of this is the 55 build. It's great for farming, but pretty worthless anywhere else.

I used to use an Air Magic build in RA, which I just continually spammed the main air spells, blasting the heck out of my target, and when I ran low on energy hitting Ether Prodigy then continuing to spam spells to keep my energy levels down.

Pretty boring, yet effective. Using Lightning Surge makes the battle more fun, even if I can't keep a barrage of spells up as long.

Judging from the skill bars I saw, that looks very similar to the strategy they must have been using. The main advantage I see with it is that mesmers can't keep you down very long, since you can always Ether Prodigy yourself back into business. That, and Air spiking is fun