Can a dex Duelist actually work?

I know that the general consensus is that dex and eva are useless stats. I'm guessing that dex is useless because most attacks don't miss anyway, and eva is useless because magic never misses. However, what if I got some decent elemental resistances and some life? Wouldn't that cover for my weaknesses nicely?

The reason I wanted to make a dex Duelist is because I like the idea of a hard hitting 1v1 character. I felt that Marauder is more for AoE, and is more suited for tanking than for 1v1ing bosses, and I like the rush of living on the edge and winning by outplaying my enemies, not simply chugging a few pots. I toyed with the notion of using a 2h sword, but it requires dex, and dex nodes aren't easily reachable on Marauder. I was going to go dual mace/axe, but I don't care about stun when my defenses are great anyway, and the accuracy bonus on axes isn't as conductive to damage as let's say, a pair of 1h swords with crit modifier.

I also thought of maybe going for a Shadow instead, but I simply prefer the awesome look of dual wielding rapiers :)

My plans for this build are to basically get some kind of decent AoE skill for large groups of mobs, and focus mainly on 1h damage, dual wield damage, sword damage, crit, evasion, some dex, and a decent amount of elemental resistances. I know of one area that has about 30-40%+ of lit/fire/ice res covered between only 7 skills, and IIRC, it's not a long trip.

Lol, it works pretty well.

ColbyCheeze ran a Duelist as an Evasion Melee Tank in a 2-week race. With things like Masters and Herald of Ash, it's even more powerful now.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgQAmSu9gUd-FFJlTYTZbmlY276nU9_STe_jm4PAD2NwhO80k3TttkF6704qYEtbrwUt3Q0Y2yzp_MXBixUgVvpnoNungUEi4ipNd9eHdglYNe9H4j8nfytKfVywbbTQgUrIMHzWitP8Ou2kOW6qUUeNfbXyjb8j9jWS3-8Ftd3nTZKjiv6P2L0o28Ls1CMb9kxgTeP-Ch3KtMUwcYO9BLGmV_JFYqzdqJVmMZ464Z2qbIxLeAOHNj06QnByG63jhNN-wJx9dac0_ro=

This is an example of the tree you would run. Dualstrike+Melee Splash will be your skill.

Evasion is only useless if you don't know how to make it work. Simply running evasion is a straight way to get killed in Wraelcast. But you've also got things like block/spell and dodge/spell. You can link Blind with things like Ice Nova on CwDT, you can use a skill that'll freeze or shock your enemies. Get decent life, decent regen, some of the supporting factors listed above and you should be ok. With one exception. Physical spell. It's your enemy number 1, you can't evade, you can't mitigate. Only dodge/block. Good thing about evasion is, you can't take down map Brutus, Kole or Piety without having any trouble.

only if you got spell block.