PvP Mechanics Questions

[Lissa]

I'm pretty sure that shields take into account damage done exactly as if they were damage done without the shield. It's always seemed as if shields last longer against physical damage when inner fire is up, for example. Though I have not done personal testing on this.

This is contrary to what I have observed. This also does not fit with your charges on IF. If IF was being included into the damage mitigation of what the shield takes, it should tick downward each time you are hit with the shield up (it does not). Also, against white damage attacks that don't crit, you should see similar amounts of damage between absorbtions on the shield and the final absorbtion and damage you take when the shield goes down and I have not see this to be true either (usually the final hit ends up coming up to less total damage than the fully absorbed hits on the shield when damage range has little variance).

Also, couple notes to Bolty,

Yes, Mana Burn is a binary, so penertation would be of help if someone has SR. You could probably stay with the Armor to cloak enchant and maybe grab a couple items with a little less healing (going damage and healing instead to get penetration) like the off hand with penetration on it, the damage rings (veteran's and vindicator's), and one other item (which I can't remember off the top of my head) which can net you close to 80 spell penetration (100 if you really want the cloak enchant, but I would disregard it as 80 should be more than enough). There is another option though, you could go 6 to 10 deep into Shadow (which you probably don't want to do) to get Shadow Focus (grabbing Blackout on the first tier) which can help as well when dealing with the binary effects of MB.