New Templar looking for advice

Hey guys, I am pretty new to POE but have years of D2, D3, WoW and other MMO / Dungeon Crawler games, so I should be able understand responses. I apologize for terminology.

I am looking to create an elemental / melee character. I sometimes run into half second lag spikes so tanky is certainly the way to go. I spent quite a bit of time looking at builds and while they looked fun and clever, none of them really hit the nail on what I was looking for. I created one myself that would exemplify being lvl 81. This isn't 100% tanky since I do want to be some sort of damage threat.

I intend to use things like static strike / frozen hammer with multistrike / melee splash + harolds for most of my skills.
I also intend to Use Curse on Hit with Warlords for life/mana gain
I will find some sort of defensive combination on damage taken, but I havent decided which one I like yet.

The build I came up with:



Looking for any veterans out there to give advice, even taking a dump on it is perfectly acceptable as long as you give reasoning that can be used to improve.

I see other builds really reaching far for their passive skills, do I take anything unnecessary that might impede getting a stronger skill later?

There are a few things I noticed I would personally change in your build.
Firstly, testudo and retaliation (shield nodes at the bottom) are too far out of your way. You spend too many points to get them without getting anything else in the immediate area.

Secondly, armor and energy shield nodes are usually not efficient unless you are stacking large amounts of them. In a normal, life based build I wouldn't get energy shield nodes, and I would only get armor nodes if I wanted to stack a TON of physical mitigation. If you want to stack physical mitigation make sure you grab all of the endurance charges you can get and keep them up all the time. Endurance charges give 4% flat physical mitigation each, so if you get 6 or 7 of them you can get up to 32% flat physical mitigation, not including your armor.

I would highly recommend unwavering stance for a build like this. You aren't stacking any evasion, so there is not a major downside.

I would consider adjusting your build to be more like this

In my opinion, the best way to scale the damage on glacial hammer or static strike is through physical, then the use of auras to convert the physical damage to extra elemental damage. For instance, if you are running glacial hammer and use the hatred aura and herald of ash, increasing your physical damage would then also increase the amount of cold damage and the amount of fire damage you are dealing. This means that your gem links should include melee physical damage as well as weapon elemental damage multistrike and melee splash.