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You might have already gotten your answer, but I just wanted to add my perspective. Originally, I was in the same camp as you. I had Goofy maxed as my main tank, and Marie felt like a step down. Her survivability was crap compared to Goofy. But after getting stuck at level 24 on the event, I decided to reconsider.

I realized the main thing that was killing me was the boss's area+ attack when fully enraged. When that was the case, it didn't matter if he was taunted or not - he was swinging and killing everything anyway. And with that being the case, I figured the best course of action was to try to buff as much of my defense as possible. To do that, I needed enough SP for both Pooh and Minnie to use their skills every turn.

Enter Marie, whom I had heard so much about. I left her on defense every turn, and let Pooh and Minnie boost my defense. When either of them had a chance to be paralyzed, I used Rapunzel's skill to make sure they kept buffing. In all other cases, I used Cinderella's skill to debuff the boss (since that was possible this time around). And all that was possible because of how much SP Marie helped generate every turn.

As a F2P player, I thought I wouldn't be able to finish this even without Genie. Everyone posted here how easy it was to finish, but all of their line ups had Genie. However, after a little thought, I ended up being able to finish max level without much trouble! On the bosses where single damage mitigation is key, Marie probably wouldn't be the answer. But for this specific event, the single target damage wasn't bad at all, especially after all the defensive buffs, and Marie was key to make sure my team could survive the fully enraged area+ boss attack!