Ageless for the debuff resistance. It will also make your heal recharge a touch faster. The to-hit debuff resistance could be usefull at times, too.
Second place goes to Rebirth (regen path). It's what I went with. I have 20% defense to each vector, meaning a medium purple softcaps me to all vectors in normal content. Now, I kinda wish I had went with Ageless. As you noted, the only time I die is when my defense is so negative it's ludicrous.
I've just gotten my Elec/SS tanker to 50, so now it's time to start doing incarnate content. I'm mostly interested in improving my defenses since my end consumption is already OK.
I can see benefits to picking barrier, rebirth, and ageless, but will probably only have time to pick out one.
Barrier seems like it would be useful to push me past my current S/L def of 47, but more importantly for handling toxic damage. But I'm only really familiar with the first two incarnate trials - is there enough toxic damage for this to be a decent choice?
Rebirth would add up some extra regen, which would be useful against pretty much everything and in almost all situations, so it seems like a safe choice.
But currently I'm leaning toward ageless for the debuff resist. Right now, when I die, it's generally due to having something like -100% defense. I was thinking of combining this with the vorpal judgement ability. Any time I see my def start to plunge to fatal levels I can hit ageless and then vorpal to ride out the defense debuffs. Not sure how this would actually work in practice, but I figure it would be better than my current strat, which is weeping while hammering on the function keys.
Can anyone offer some insight into which ability to pick? Thank you!
Active (Freedom): Setna (Ice/Psi Dom), Arram (WP/KM Tank), Tesmiel (Elec/SS Tank), Astredax (Robot/Dark Mastermind), Operative Vidali (melee fortunata)
Retired (Virtue): Gaav (Inv/EM Tank), Baqra (Fire/SS Tank)