D&D 5E Please evaluate my fighter build OR: help me fit a square peg in a round hole

[AtG]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Will be incorporating some of this into future feat choices. In particular it had slipped my notice that a quarterstaff could be used with a shield.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Turns out the party is an illusion wizard, a healy druid, and a bard. The wizard and the druid are novice players to TTRPG as a whole. So I'm going to drop the enabling plan and just be defendery.

Good call. Still don't know why you're bothering with more than a little INT. All it gets you is a license not to RP 'dumb.'

Ultimately this means no real change to my build or my planned feat progression (although I'm going to move resilient: wisdom to 8 from 14). Once I can afford a breastplate I'll be at 18 AC. Combined with THP from the bard's Heroism and I feel pretty tanky.

You could do better in the AC department, and Heavy Armor Mastery is really nice at low level, FWTW. But, fine, stealthy - if you /really/ want stealthy, go for a DEX build, there are plenty of nice finesse weapons. OTOH, if you go heavy armor, and the DM is nice enough to mostly use group stealth checks, you won't generally be holding the party back.

Shield Mastery can figure into a psuedo-defender build, might want to move that one up. It takes feats to fake being a defender in 5e, Variant Human, if available, might be a good idea.