Retaliate support gem suggestions

I like the idea of the retaliate support gems, particularly the risk/reward of absorbing hits intentionally to gain more damage. But I've tried a few ideas to try to make it work well, and am finding it a bit difficult to feel competitive with other builds. Of course, I'm only interested in them being viable, I don't think retaliate support will ever be meta because it's a reactive playstyle.

Some thoughts from my experience with retaliate support:

-There's currently no passive nodes that benefit this sort of reactive playstyle. The only thing that applies at all is stun threshold, which is actually not a good thing to have, because it makes it much harder to reach your damage boost. There's also another node early in the warrior section that reduces the time it takes to get rid of stun buildup. Again, this is not actually what you want while using retaliate, because it makes it harder to maintain your damage bonus.

-To this end, adding more benefits that scale with stun buildup on the player would be really nice. Particularly, more defensive benefits, so that you can perform lengthy mace attacks without dying.

-It would also be nice if the "gain rage when hit" nodes also counted to hits you actively block. This would synergize well with increased damage from retaliate, and you can get some defensive benefits depending on the nodes you take that scale with rage.

-It may be preferrable to make retaliate a persistent spirit buff instead. If I'm trying to use a retaliate build, I either have to put retaliate on all of my skills, or only use a single skill as my 'retaliate' skill. Either one feels not that great. The benefits of making a persistent spirit skill out of retaliate is that more value can be attributed to it, such as also granting defensive bonuses and the like.

-This is a personal preference, but I liked that in poe1 you could take a notable passive to gain retaliation skill useage based on hits taken instead. An idea I could see working here in poe2, especially with how slow mace attacks are, is allowing a passive notable to grant 2 handed/non-blocking weapons the ability to gain heavy stun buildup from hits taken during attack animations, either for the full duration or just during the windup.

-One idea I had was to have maybe a unique warcry or skill that spent your heavy stun buildup in exchange for a dramatic bonus. In a sense giving the player some agency in how they control their heavy stun buildup, so that if things get too dangerous, they have an option that gives them some more breathing room. For example, a warcry that reduces current buildup by 50%/25% but grants an amount of that buildup as a damage bonus on empowered attacks (with enemy power scaling the amount of empowered attacks). Or a skill like berserk which sacrifices buildup and some HP to grant lifeleech or similar ideas.

- I also had the thoughts that synergizing it with iron ward and direstrike would be really fun, but iron ward is difficult to utilize well. Due to it's tags, it's not counted as an attack, so it can't scale with retaliate support, and it takes a long time to charge up (and can't charge up at all against non-physical damage). It would be nice if iron ward was given the ability to tally up any damage mitigated by armor, since that new stat was added which allows armor to apply to non-physical damage. There's already an opportunity cost associated with going for those stats and passive nodes, and armor's effectiveness is somewhat limited anyways. I don't expect a change like this to be too strong?

Those are some thoughts I had. Any suggestions or discussions are welcome.