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1 EB is enough to have 100% uptime. You need 3x Aegis for that, which translates into 3 heroes that need to take a secondary and invest lots of attribute points that are otherwise useless. I can use those to kill things faster or move around faster.
EB working on minions can't be overstated if you use them. With EB nothing can kill minions other than spell casters with strong nuking abilities. Furthermore, the better player you are the more damage that the minions take in your place. Many battles not a single of my party members comes under attack from an enemy, Aegis would be useless. If you want minions to be able to tank through HM DoA, you need something like EB. Mathematically EB is not inferior to Aegis in protective ability, it is quite comparable if not better in some instances. Aegis is 50% miss chance, EB is -66% damage plus -1 attributes (another -3-5% on average probably). Aegis has the side benefit of working vs attack skills and adrenaline, but enemies that hit for 200 damage apiece are dealing 90% of their damage with what EB is reducing. Unless the enemy is using interruption skills that need to be blocked I would put EB firmly ahead of Aegis. EB is also consistent unlike Aegis where there is a 12.5% chance of 3 of those hits getting through in a row and killing a character quickly. Not terribly likely in individual battles but over the course of an area it can easily translate into an extra death. |
The point with minions is that you kill the mob, hit AotL to refresh your army and move on. If the minions live, great; if they die, so be it, you raise new ones. You get new bodies after the mob anyway. I suspect minions die in DoA HM more because of Shockwave etc than it is because of melee monsters. Remember also that DoA HM is well above the difficulty of the rest of the game.
A team should have multiple defenses against dying; you should not die if a monster hits through Aegis three times in a row. Not only does he need to do that, you also need to have failed in managing his aggro, failed with getting Prot Spirit onto the attacked target, failed to kite some of the damage and failed to heal him. It's a lot to fail with. If it does happen it is very rare indeed, on par perhaps with Enfeebling Blood failing to save someone because they were split up and you can't get both of them with the cast.
Call EB whatever you want to call it, but I'll call it a weak skill because it's completely outclassed.