Yea, to be honest, I think it's a shield.

An instant cast shield is something SCH's needed for a while, personally (to be honest, Adlo should've been instant cast, but have no heal to it). In fact, the spell effect looks a lot like adlo once I think about it. Just that the casting animation is closer to excog.

While I do think excog should be upgraded (something closer to a full heal to deal with so many 1hp tank CDs nowadays, especially living dead), doing an offensive buff on a tank is kinda worthless. I know that they do worthless things on the various demos, but it really feels like some sort of shield to me, since there's a clear bubble effect going on.