Do Shields Count as Healing, Damage Taken, or Neither?

I always forget that scrap reduces supercharge cooldown. Weird since I use it on literally every alt. If quislet is at 200, yeah I’d definitely rock him over scrap. I do on my main which is why he’s the one toon without scrap. But under 200, I’ll stick with scrap. It’s like solar amp, still a great artifact under 200. Getting alts to 200 just ain’t happening anytime soon. My tank alt has all 200 tank artifacts and then all 140 on the dps side so tetra trans and scrap are decent at that point.

I am going to get another scrap on my main. Thinking I can pull off a a 5 supercharge EoG healer build. Scrap would be getting the nod over phr. Or at least be tac swapping it. We shall see. We’ve mostly been running 2 heals in tsde still so if one can go full heal loadout and I can do 3 to 5 eogs, should work out well enough to deal with handcuffs. Maybe even run quislet and not run any healer artifacts. Something to try for fun anyway

Due to a hand injury and then the coronavirus, I almost don't play this DLC...and of course, I didn't play this DLC for an elite raid...so the sacred meaning of such a concentration on increasing DPS to the limits of the possible eludes me, let alone the developers on this time they introduced some kind of mechanic where turning the controller and healer into walking trinkets for dps has a real creep besides reducing the length of the raid by a couple of minutes?

The whole game is a burn comp lately but this raid specifically, lots of adds that need to be taken out asap. But it’s also a raid that (almost) forces you to be 2 tank/ 2 heal setup. At the higher levels, pretty much completely forced. So your dps need to be fantastic. Electric is ruling this dlc and most now are running neo venom and circuit breaker. We were doing 1 heal with 3 eogs the other night and 5 dps and it was over in 20mins while fooling around/ wiping. That was bottom level elite. Buff trolls are always going to be everyone’s choice nowadays so that’s all there is to comment on that.

As far as me thinking 5 eogs, we tried 2 heals with 2 eogs and both were uncomfortable. If only one healer was spamming, the other could be concentrating on pure healing which would be good. In the meantime, I can still be throwing my circle out or keep page in and just spam my group heal for a little help.

Tank situation, every fight is easier with 2. It can be solo’d but then rng comes into it a bit more. Like hand cuffs and sniper shots. So in the end, if there’s only 3 dps, they need all the help they can get. As long as they’re being fed tons of green spam, electrics are doing massive damage. It’s definitely not something that is going to go away unless the next raid is boss heavy vs add heavy. Every fight is set up so grouped together is best method too so that really brings EoG up front. It’s got large rooms but there’s no real point to using all the real estate available. No CTE mechanics of social distancing this time around.

From your post, I got the impression that your league is not negatively opposed to experiments ... have you tried using a battle tank (tanks can be distracted for damage to the boss or not? ) and a battle healer (well, or dps with orb as an assisted healing) instead of EoG spam?

Our best battle tank just got back in the country sunday. So hopefully give that a try shortly. Honestly, I’m pretty much just LFG grouping it at this point. Mostly everyone I know has moved on to other games for the time being. They’re just logging in for valentines daily and log right back off. You know how it is, everyone spams for 2 weeks then takes off. We even ran alts this time around but everyone ghosted after a month.

The other numbers you should look at if this is happening often, is how many deaths there are. Whether it's your fault or not (not saying either way), the probable consensus from a group with a lot of deaths + a high DPS tank with low damage in will be to kick the tank. If you are really doing your job, the best I can say is don't take it personally and try to run with people you know more often...if possible. If you are NOT really doing your job(not saying that...I wasn't there), you might need to change your actions and worry less about dpsing when you are tanking. As mentioned by Lorax, doing damage is not your job. Not that you CAN'T do both (I've seen some impressive battle tanks) but maybe you shouldn't.

As far as gaining agro, yes, you should be using pulls often. Lasso(with the arti) is nice to group them, but as mentioned above, it doesn't really hold agro. I use lasso on my fire tank and it's great to clean up all the hallway trash, but once I have it near me I use backdraft or engulf to re-pull and agro (and juggle) the adds. You are right that just 'being' a tank will get you some agro, but holding and controlling adds requires re-applying agro and pulling adds repeatedly.

But to answer the shield question, yes, shields count for -damage. Those grey numbers that are ticking when you get hit basically add 0 to your incoming damage. If you are using a LOT of shields in a good rotation it should lower the incoming damage number a lot. Pets like brick, I'm not sure on. It's damage might count against your number, even if it doesn't impact your personal health level.

PS. As far as the hate coming your way on this post, it does seem a bit like you are worried to much about doing damage (marked in yellow). You also seem to minimize the importance of actually doing 'tanky' things (in green). So overall, yeah...maybe a bit focused on doing DPS or minimizing your own damage vs drawing it away from the rest of the group. Just saying...

PPS....Just read more of your loadout and rotation replies....Uh, good luck with that.