so I made a loop of bones for each edge loop in the top eyelid and it seems to have worked well! I still need to tweak a few things but all in all its deforming nicely with only rare cases of clipping (if I stretch 2 eye lid parts too far away from eachother) thanks for the tip :)
I like to have a separate joint chain for each vertex in the eyelid that is rotated from the center of the eyeball, so that each loop making up the eye lids detail follows it's curvature.