Duelists with experience, please help me NOT waste my time

Personally I'm of the opinion that Iron Reflexes is better early on, but Arrow Dodging with hybrid armour/evasion is better later. The goal for that concept is to get just enough evasion to get a 95% evade chance vs ranged, then stack armour. You can't do that earlier because you won't have enough evasion to reach that point and still have some armour without great gear.

The point regarding armor's "diminishing returns" (not accurate, but I understand why people think this) and Endurance charges is important to understand.

The deal with armor is that it *does* increase DR as you put more points into it, but the way DR works is that the higher the incoming damage, the less proportional DR you get. This means that in most cases you will see good returns from adding armor. But the armor mechanic is such that the higher the value of increasing damage, the less DR you will get, to the point where someone with 51% DR may be only getting 20% DR from a boss critical. In other words, armor DR doesn't scale well. All that armor will seem worthless when Brutus one-shots you.

A well known PoE player-theorist, Kripparian (you'll see lots of posts asking about Kripp's builds), has posted a great YouTube video titled "Why you will never faceroll in PoE". You can watch it here: http://youtu.be/1j5a_voG6K4. In this video, Kripp explains in some depth the concept I'm talking about here, even showing his spreadsheet on how damage is applied vs. DR. Watch it. In fact, even with all his armor he gets one-shotted by Brutus and he explains why in detail.

So, DR doesn't scale well as damage incrases. This is where Endurance charges come in. When you have those little orange balls floating around you, they ADD additional armor. And the added armor that you get from Endurance charges, unlike standard armor, do not suffer this effect of losing proportional effect as damage increases. They remain fully potent, stacking additional full armor protection as you add them. This means that, the more endurance charges you have, the better protected you will be in those situations where the damage is so high that your armor has lost a lot of its DR value. This is why Endurance charges are so critical to melee. And if that wasn't enough, Endurance charges also grant resistance bonuses. You really need to learn how and when to generate Endurance charges (using the skill Enduring Cry) and how to keep them up, extend them, maximize how many you can get(there are tree nodes that do this, I encourage you to take them).

Hope that helps.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. This is all very much helps. I honestly love this game, I just want to do it right, and I hate the idea of getting my duelist high in level and spending my passives in all the wrong places, because I just want to make it viable is all while maintaining my sword and shield style.