Ok, so here are some general ideas, after looking at your guy:
It’s good to aim for one or two main “attack” skills, one movement skill, and let the rest of your sockets be occupied by support auras and/or situational skills. I see Cleave, Lacerate, and Double Strike as main attack skills. It’d be better to focus on one of those and ditch the others to free up sockets. The main attack skill should probably be in your chest, because that’s the piece of armor that can have 6 sockets (and you typically want your main attack skill to have a lot of linked support gems).
The only reason you’d need two “main” skills is if one was really good at AOE damage but bad at single target damage. So you’d set up one attack skill for AOE and one attack skill for boss damage. That’s fairly rare though.
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Your main skill, let’s say it’s Lacerate, should be linked to gems that will help extend its effectiveness and damage. Most builds list six gems for a main skill like this - the assumption is that if you only have 4 linked sockets you use the first 4 gems. If you get a 5-link item, you use the first 5, and when (if) you get a 6-link items, you use all 6 gems.
for Lacerate I see this from a random Lacerate build I googled:
Lacerate - Melee Physical Damage - Multistrike - Pulverize - Brutality - Onslaught (G-R-R-R-R-G)
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movement skill: I see you use Cyclone. That’s a good one. You can link some support games to it to make it more than ‘just’ a movement skill. For instance: linking Fortify to Cyclone means whenever you hit someone with Cyclone, you’ll get the Fortify buff. That reduces the damage you take, and that’s good. Also, it’s very common to link Faster Attacks to Cyclone since that causes it to go faster (if you examine a gem you’ll see they are either classified as an ‘Attack’ or a ‘Spell’ - including movement skills. ‘Attack’ movement skills get linked to ‘Faster Attacks’ and ‘Spell’ movement skills get linked to ‘Faster casting’ - but it’s the same concept in either case - you want your movement skill to go fast!).
Cyclone - Faster Attacks - Fortify (G-G-R)
Since that’s a 3-link it can go in a weapon.
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Auras: You usually don’t have to worry about linking these, so you can plop them wherever you have room. Blood & Sand and Flesh & Stone are good, as long as you don’t mind having to diddle with them whenever you need to! Those two reserve 35% of your mana. You might think about another aura if you can fit it in - like Pride or Herald of Purity. Those are physical damage skills and I think they would work for you.
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Situational Tools: Ancestral Protector is great. Continue using that.
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Automatic Defenses: One great tool at our disposal is having some automatic defenses that pop up when we take a big hit. The way to achieve that is through the gem ‘Cast When Damage Taken’ (also called CWDT). If you have the following gems linked:
CWDT - Summon Stone Golem - Maim - Melee Splash (R-R-R-R)
Then when you take a certain amount of damage, your Stone Golem spell will automatically go off - and he will have Maim/Melee Splash. The downside to this is that you can no longer manually Summon the stone golem - it can ONLY go off when you take damage. The upside is that when you take a hit, you will 100% get the golem.
The level of the CWDT controls how powerful of a spell it can fire off. A level 1 CWDT can only cast a level 38 or lower spell. So if you have a level 1 CWDT and the spell linked to it has a minimum level 45, that spell will never go off. Also, the higher level the CWDT is, the more damage you have to take for it to go off. Because of this people will typically use CWDT in two ways, depending on the CWDT behavior you want:
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keep CWDT at level 1: link it to spells you want to go off a lot. A Stone Golem is fine (you’d have to keep the gem at level 3 or so I think). You can also link it to Immortal Call.
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level CWDT very high: link it to spells to really save your bacon. A high level CWDT won’t go off very much (because you have to take a LOT of damage to trigger it) but when it goes off you know you really need the help!). You could link this to a golem, or to Steelskin/Molten Shell.
In fact, nothing says you can’t have both: one “low level” CWDT:
CWDT (Lv 1) - Stone Golem - Maim - Immortal Call
and a high level one:
CWDT (Lv20) - Steelskin - uh… stuff!
So let’s see what we have here:
- Lacerate 4 to 6 links in chest
- Cyclone: 3 links in weapon
- Auras: 3 links in other weapon
- CWDT low level: 4 links in gloves/helm/boots
- CWDT high level: 4 links in gloves/helm/boots
That leaves a few links here or there for stuff I forgot.
There you go! :D
P.S., Oh yeah, after you get your gear/links/gems sorted out, next step should be crafting resistances on your gear so you can get Fire/Cold/Lightning to 75% each.
P.P.S., You should also use the Bestiary to craft a life flask of Staunching (anti-bleed) because that’s the one big thing that kills you after the fact - when you have all those red globes circling your guy, and you say ‘hm, what are those things?’ and 3 seconds later you have bled to death.
