Ether Lord, I found a use for it.

Before I start I would like to request that you actually read what I have written, and give logical reasons for any counter arguments. Basically no "ether lord is stupid someone should shoot you!" comments .

Ok, so we have all heard why Ether lord should be ripped from the Mesmer list, scalded with Acid, and thrown onto a highway right? It's an energy tap that can only be cast on low energy, gives less energy, and takes time to recieve the effect. Boy is that a pile of crap, or is it......

Ok, enough with the cheesy suspence. Basically, I just think people are looking at the skill wrong. You don't use Lord for the energy gain, you use it for what it can do to someone who has just been drained of all their energy. If cast directly after draining, it will lock that player down so that they will be unable to reach 5 energy for the duration of the spell. This is desierable, since once at 5 energy many casters can use an energy regen spell or glyph to get themselves back up to speed, which you don't want. So if lord is cast correctly the opponent will be at about three energy when the spell ends. Including the time needed to get to 5 energy from there, their total lockdown time comes to about 11 seconds. Or you could time an ether feast to hit them when at 4 energy (this is after Lord has ended), increasing their down time to more like 15 seconds. And all of this would only cost you 1-2 energy. (this is not including the initial draining, just the extended lockdown period)

In an energy denial build, I thnk this would be useful. It pays for itself, letting you spend your energy on other things, and Ether Feast is probably going to (or at least should) be there anyway, so the whole thing is only taking up one skill slot.

Using Ether Lord for energy denial isn't a new idea and, in fact, it's probably the only reason you'd really want to use it at this point as other "denial over time" skills like Wither and Malaise have been nerfed into uselessness. That still doesn't make it any good .

Denying someone's energy after you've taken it all away is an example of "winning more". It's the same reason that using Mind Wrack because you've stolen every last drop of energy is a bad idea. At that point, you've won. Your opponent has no energy, they're at your mercy, and throwing Ether Lord at them is just sitting on their head after you've burried them in the sand. That's all well and good and you do need to be able to step on someone's neck after you've brought them to the floor but it's far more important to get to that point in the first place. Winning more won't help you if you can't win in the first place. Since you only have eight skill slots, carrying along something like Ether Lord to help you after you've already decided things is a suboptimal plan because you need to decide things first and you've only got so much to do it with. Rather than trying to finish someone off with something that's only good when finishing them off, it's better to find something that helps not just to finish them off but to bring them to the finish point, too. Rather than deny non-existant energy if you could deny that energy in the first place just do it again once they get a little back. Smack 'em with another Energy Drain or Debilitating Shot or Fear Me! or whatever it was you were using originally to drain away their energy and free up that slot reserved for Ether Lord for something else that's going to be of more usefulness in more critical phases of a battle.

A darn good point.

Although I could go on to say that they arn't exacly down after they are at 0 since after several seconds they could recover to a battle ready position through an energy recovery spell of some kind, ether Lord would still be inferior to a simple interupt at that point, so there goes my idea!

It still loses all energy? I thought they took that part of it out....

Yea I know about that, I mentioned it up by it's disadvantages when I said you have to cast it at low energy, not like it matters now, since it is an inferior choice to simply Power Draining their recovery spell (if they even have one that is).

As has been said above, once use I had thought for it was to keep a target at 0 energy for about 10 extra seconds. So you drain somone down to 0 or near 0, but you want to switch to another target without having to worry about your first target for a bit. I had thought Ether lord might be useful to keep them out of the game for another 10 seconds.

My main thought was to use a weapon switch to minimize the energy loss when casting this spell. So you start out a fight with full energy, wielding your wand/focus, cast power leak and whatnot to get a target down to about 0 energy. Throw whatever other spells you need to get yourself down to about 15-20 enegery, then switch to an empty weapon switch. This should drop your energy down to about the 5 minimum required for Ether lord, cast that and switch back to your wand/focus. This should put you back up to an ok amount of energy, with extra regen for a bit. If you saved energy drain or tap or power drain til after you had cast ether lord then you could boost your energy up that much faster.

So what you would do is whenever you got down to about 15-20 energy you switch, throw ether lord and switch back. Only thing that makes me not sure is the duration, 9 seconds is rather short.