Honestly I have never seen going for malleability better than corporeal/calcify on a char that did not have despoil.

As for tanking yeah I did find be against pretty much everyone except charmy armies and shifters. I flat out couldn’t manage tribs without using subvert to avoid tanking.

The caveat to that is I geared for damage and not HP so I was at ~800hp usually. Secondly he was before current wand system so his only access to barrier was killing other mages. Put up a ton of kills but shifters/necro/conjurer tote through me and I tended to run out of mana before paladins ran out of hp.