Building a Staff-wielding, Infernal Blow Templar. Need feedback

Introduction

Disclaimer: I am a noob, this build may not be viable and the specs may be horribly misplaced.

My idea for the build is a templar ideally using Searing Touch long staff. This is the main combination of gems I hope to use:



That, mixed with 1 or 2 auras and regularly casting Flammability

For single target, I would use something like heavy strike with similar support gems.


Passives

I have a skill tree sketched up here:

Final Strength and Intelligence are both just under 300.

Key Nodes
Eldritch Battery: I am not sure if ES from items will be enough to afford me auras + enough mana to cast flammability, but that's the current plan.

Resolute Technique and Unwavering Stance: I like consistency and I didn't put any points into dex. I don't THINK I need crits, and I want to stack armor/life pretty heavily.

Other Nodes
My biggest worry is I don't have enough armor/life to survive late-game. I don't really know how many nodes I need for that. Also, if I need ES for mana, I won't have as much armor, which might be bad? I am going to play on Softcore, but still. Furthermore, I'm not sure about my resistances. Couldn't find many nodes when I scanned the tree.

I don't think I have any staff nodes, but I do have fire damage nodes. I haven't run the calculations to see which are better yet, considering most of the fire damage is modified from physical?


Requested Feedback

I would like to hear how the build currently looks in terms of survivability, and get some feedback as to where I should divert some of my focus.

Can you think of any skills that might complement those I chose? Don't know if I can use Searing Bond without the totem nodes?

Also, my one regret is I didn't get to any attack speed nodes. They seem pretty far away.

And anything you would like to share, thanks.

While The Searing Touch is great for many fire-based builds, it isn't for Infernal Blow as it quite simply lacks physical damage. The fire damage that IB deals is converted from physical, and the fire damage nodes scale off of this physical damage. The Searing Touch's base physical damage is around 1/15th of a decent end-game staff, so no matter how much increased fire damage you stack you will spend minutes killing a single mob end-game, and anything with life regeneration or life leech you simply cannot kill.

Staves are cool but somewhat underwhelming unless you actually make use of their ability to block, such as picking up the Whirling Barrier notable, especially if you want Unwavering Stance.

Infernal Blow is one of my favourite skills and while I don't really fancy the "do this because it's awesomest and everything else is crud" approach there are a couple of points that make IB really shine:

- Melee Splash support gem
When you smack something with IB, you "tag" it for 0.5s (IIRC) so that if it dies within that timeframe it'll blow up, dealing damage within a fairly small area. If a single mob is tagged it'll blow up dealing 25% of it's maximum life, if two mobs are tagged they'll blow up dealing 2x25% of their maximum life (assuming for simplicity their health pools are equal), if four mobs are tagged they'll explode for 4x25% etc. The more mobs you tag the more damage you will deal. Say there's a squishy spider, a somewhat less squishy skeleton and a rhoa with a bit more hp in the middle of a pack of bears that have alot of hp. You start smacking with your IB supported by melee splash, tagging all or most of the mobs in the pack, the spider soon dies and explodes, dealing enough damage to also kill the skeleton, which now explodes as it's been tagged with IB, dealing enough damage to kill the rhoa which now explodes, and the sum of these explosions is enough to kill a couple of bears that explode and kill off the entire pack. Add in a rare monster that had ten times the life of a single bear and you can kill the rare by simply dealing enough damage to kill the squishy spider. Pretty neat!

- Increased area
The tagging that Infernal Blow does is increased/decreased by any area modifiers you have through nodes, support gems and gear. The radius of Melee Splash is similarly modified, as is the explosion radius of each mob as they die. Thus any radius increase you pick up improves your damage-dealing potential by a large degree whenever you are dealing with multiple mobs, which will be the vast majority of the time. Additionally, quality Infernal Blow and Melee Splash gems both have increased radius giving you the potential to progress from throwing a few firecrackers nearby you to sending exploding flesh flying halfway across the screen killing monsters long before they get a chance to lay their dirty hands on you.

- Multistrike support gem
While having a high mana multiplier, this support is a boon to most melee skills and even more so to Infernal Blow. Instead of attacking your chosen victim once you instead attack three times, but the second and third attack will hit other mobs if they are close enough. While this might seem counterproductive it certainly is not. Each hit deals splash damage thanks to Melee Splash and each hit on a different target will effectively increase the area which you cover with Infernal Blow. The more mobs you tag, the more will die to chain explosions as soon as you've dealt lethal damage to the first.

Thanks for the insight! I'll be using some of this info to alter my plan. I still want to use IB, but I think I'll change to a 1h weapon, get some shield nodes and +physical damage.

Also I think I'll cut Eldritch Battery b/c not sure if I'd need it. Not sure what auras I'd use.