It seems to me that Leadership, Perseverance, and Retribution are overall unsubstantial in terms of impact and give very little reason to invest in over offense abilities.
Leadership provides +5% dodging and +5% to all resistances for your allies, which seems great on paper except you have to be within 5 meters of the person for the affect to work. Considering how important positioning is, this is counter intuitive as it sets you team up to be easily affected by any surfaces or aoe abilities. Also, since it doesn't affect the person with points in that ability, you would need to have 2 members with points invested in it, thus cutting down the value of your investment by half (You can have one person not reap the benefits but considering how people will be grouped up, their likely to be targeted over other members).
Retribution reflects 10% of any damage taken to your attacker. The thing to note is that you still take the same amount of damage regardless of how many points you have invested, only the damage reflected is increased. This is only particularly useful on a tank that can soak up alot of damage, and since there is very little you can do to aggro enemy units, you have no guarantee that you will even be targeted in the first place. While it can somewhat synergize with necromancy (heal for a percent of damage reflected), you cannot restore physical or magical armor with this ability, still making you susceptible to any form of crowd control.
Perseverance restores 5% of your magical/physical armor based on what form of crowd control your character recovers from. This is imo the least useful stat due to how negligible the % is. This in particular doesn't protect you from follow up crow control as damage is applied before the effect takes place. To put in perspective how weak this attribute is, if a lvl 1 Aerothurge were to use Electric Discharge to follow up on a previous stun, you would need atleast 160 maximum magic armor to recover enough to negate that stun assuming the stun only does 8 damage. This doesn't consider the duration of that stun or any ongoing damaging effects like poison or burning.
Basically, defense abilities seem to be either too situational to be worth investing in or just not useful at all.
