blackout

Why is blackout used so often? Agreed, u shutdown your opponent, but you also shutdown yourself, so whats the point? Defensively, you can disable disruption to allow another person to get a cast through. You can blackout warriors on the spike or after watching them build adrenaline to neuter the enemy offense.

You can use it as an interrupt.

Offensively, you can shut down monks on a spike, you can shut them down when under heavy pressure to force a break. You can combine it with other shutdowns to cripple the backline for a push.

Blackout is a team skill - it's almost never used for the Mesmer (you can catch spikes on yourself), it's used to amplify the effects of what your group as a whole can do, by eliminating opposition temporarily, be it to your defence or to your offense. The ability to control when this is done is the power in blackout - along with the adren wiping factor. What you need to remember is always to blackout in an uneven manner - that is to say, what you lose needs to be less than what they lose. The style of the enemy skillbar (long recharge skills aren't worth aiming blackouts for, that includes your own skillbar) and the timing of application are important with that. Due to how variable target priority is, disabling two characters will have a difference in actual reduced team power. That is why the timing of blackout is the most important factor - a monk is ten thousand times more important when the team is breaking and they need some quick RCs or LoDs, and that's when losing him for 6 seconds is worse than your mesmer for five.

This is further affected by the state of the enemy - if you've got huge pressure on one monk already, blacking out the other removes well over 50% of the backline's capacity. If you combo power block and blackout, you can eliminate nearly the entire backline for a quick push- where sacrificing your Mesmer skills for 5 seconds is well worth knocking out the monks for a short period - giving you an opportunity to exploit. Blackout can be used liberally in a defensive manner, but in terms of offense it is something you have to co-ordinate with your team in order to make the best use of the small window.

Essentially, the more importance that falls to a single character - ie: he's doing the most shutdown, or healing the most damage, or dealing the most damage, the more vulnerable he is to a blackout as that takes out the most from the other team. Much like diversion, the use of any shutdown skill is to remove key skills from the offensive or defensive capacity of the team in order to provide openings to break them. Reading the state of the match and understanding what poses the biggest challenge to your team, be it defensively, offensively, in terms of mobility etc, is important for every class in how they handle themselves, but shutdown has some of the greatest capacity to effectively remove it. Hence, by applying blackout your goal is to shift the balance of power between the two teams far enough to achieve a breakthrough, or to hold up against their attempt.