advice for my build

heres my tree


and my items


do you think that the skills are too general and should focus on fewer stats?
i just started cruel yesterday(2nd difficulty) and pretty much getting owned, but i guess that happens to everybody,right?
if i need survivability should i take a shield, because i have 2h and mace nodes and not enough respec points,but then again ele resistances would be great

Well no that doesn't happen to everybody but the reason why you are struggling in cruel is pretty obvious after looking at your skill build.
You are a melee character and got a huge lack of survivability while armor is a good thing to have the main source of defense is your effective health (HP+ES) and at this point your equipment doesn't provide nearly enough health or energy shield to make you survive.

You took a lot of offensive nodes pretty much at the beginning and while that is a common mistake it still is a mistake, you have to start every build with a base defense you can completely ignore damage until you got enough life/es to actually survive.

I would personally reroll the character you are not quite at a high lvl and it shouldn't take more than a few hours to get there.
You could as well try to respec some stuff get a bit better equipment and try to run with a shield for a while but thats not really worth the effort in my opinion.

thanks for the time, i will cosider it
but how should i get more life? through basic strength nodes?thers only a few more life% nodes near me, and im planning to get these

any other opinions?

Did you have any success in getting your Templar out of the rut in Cruel? I'm completely uninterested in mine until I can figure out how to play it.

Ideally Templar *should* be staff or totems by his tree placement, but I don't have the gear for either.

Internet suggested builds are elemental bow, or lightning strike with a 1h mace + shield.

Hey guys,

I've been there before. It sucks, I know. Check out this build. You can pretty much do anything with it. Staff, totems, melee, caster you name it. There are so many possibilities.



Also check out my thread for some tips on how to get things rolling.

Thanks Phatman, I ended up getting a Searing Touch drop (finally) which inspired me to continue onwards as a Fire Templar (with effectively 3x more multi-target dps than any other hero I have (up to +10 levels)). With a 11 points free, I guess I'll head down into Marauder starting tree for the HP now.

Minions are good meatshields for now though :)

def need to get as much HP and str nodes as you can get.. with supplemental HP regen and capped ele resists. you have low ele resists and low regen, and your HP pool is also lacking. a good way to go full on survival mode is just heap on defense passives (the big notables... that big circle of armor+ES nodes is a waste to take) until you can facetank most of the goons in act 3 merciless. then you can pick whatever offensive nodes you want.

basically you just need to be economical in how you spend your passives. pick the most cost efficient nodes. to find the true value of a cluster of passives, add all the passive gains and then divide it by the amount of passive points it cost, including the passives used on your connecting nodes getting there. you'll arrive at the true value of that cluster; how how much defense/offense each passive points nets you.

here is an example of my templar. very defensive in nature but he lacks damage... that should change once he gets more levels. basically its defense first.