Block Chance or Block Recovery more important?

Im building a sword and shield duelist, and the plans right now are to avoid the IR/US combo, and I was wondering if until I was able to net a shield that had good block recovery(if not Derasso's) would it be better to invest in the higher block chance shield(Scarlet) or the High Block Recovery Shield("Tree")?

You can avoid IRUS if you want, but I'll just state this: You will most likely be gimped. If you aren't skilling IRUS you could just pick another class and have more effective shield / evasion based melee character.

Ill keep that in mind, and I do understand that with thoes two keystones, Block Recovery doesn't mean crap, making scarlet sheilds(or for that matter tower sheilds) the goto choice, but with that in mind, what would be better without the two keystones?

scarlet shields? I think your mixing up your terminology,

theres 6 classes of shields. each based on each class (or attribute requirement).

you have Tower shields (pure Str) Bucklers (pure Dex) Spirit shields (pure Int) Round Shields (Dex/Str) Kite shields (Int/Str) and Spiked Shields (Int/Dex)

Tower shields are your full armor and heavy shields that will reduce your movement by 6%, all others will be only 3% movement reduction. You wont find higher amounts. unless you have a ton of dex, the bucklers and round shield will not even match this with IR

Bucklers are your full evasion shields, These will have an average higher block chance than other shields.

Spirit shields has your Energy shields and will provide a bonus to spell damage.

Round shields will have your evasion and armor on it, combined it will always be a smaller amount than pure armor or pure evasion, but it makes up for this by having a block recovery which will usually shave off anywhere from 1-2 seconds off your recovery time.

Kite shields are your Energy shield and armor, again combined its not as good as the pure, but it does come with 8-24% elemental resistances which is a big chunk of elemental damages.

spike shields are your energy shield and evasion, again combined its not as good as the pure, but provides you with a damage returned to melee attacks.

so the hybrid shields are weaker in terms of defense, but they provide strong utility.

http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Shield for majority of the stats
http://www.pathofexile.com/item-data/armour for basic information

Im not mixing my terminology. Basically each type of shield has 2-3 sub types

For example, Round Shields have, "Tree" Shields(Fir, Maple, Teak) which have a 24% Block Chance, and a 180% recovery, and "Scarlet" Shields(Scarlet, Crimson, Cardinal) which have a 28% Block, but no Block Recovery. These two shields are the basis of my question.

Thus the best shields for an IR/US(due to no recovery required) duelist are "Hide",(30% Block) "Painted", or "War Door" tower sheild(better armour at the same block ratings as Scarlet shields.) if you have an Armour focus, or possibly Scarlet shields if a heavier use of Evasion buffs.

hummm interesting, didnt realize there was a subset, thanks for pointing that out

Figured Id give this one bump since I haven't really gotten a clear answer.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/11707/page/1

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Blocking
Blocking an attack prevents all damage and other harmful effects from the attack. Usually, only attacks and attack skills can be blocked, but there are some passive skills that allow you to block spells.

Chance to block is capped at 75%.

When an attack is blocked, the game first calculates if the attack would have caused a stun were it not blocked. If it would have caused a stun, the blocking animation is played, stunning you briefly. If it would not have caused a stun, then you get a "free" block with no animation. Faster Block and Stun Recovery and Increased Block Recovery modifiers reduce the length of the blocking animation.

Armour / Damage Reduction
Damage Reduction reduces physical damage taken. Elemental damage and damage-over-time are not affected. The amount of damage reduction depends on the defender's armour total, and the attacker's attack damage:

reduction = armour / (armour + 12*damage)

The amount of reduction is capped, it cannot be more than 90%.

The fact that damage reduction scales with the amount of damage means it is difficult to know exactly how much damage is being reduced.
An easy to remember rule of thumb is that to achieve 50% damage reduction, you will need an armour rating equal to twelve times that of the damage being dealt. For example, to achieve 50% damage reduction against a 100 damage hit, you'll need 1200 armour.

Here are two graphical representations of the armour formula:
Effect of X Armour on Damage

best I can do on the subject

Block recovery is important for fighting bosses and heavy hitters, block chance is for negating mob damage. Honestly they each have their own purpose.

Ah k. Sounds like the best answer is to run it with one of both types. K.

I think you had it backwards there, you want block chance recovery for mobs of enemies while you want high block chance against single target bosses.

the reasoning behind it is because block chance is great on a 1 on 1 fight, the attacks are coming in slow enough that when you block a 3-2 second delay isnt going to affect you as much because they'll be attacking at a similar rate and not every hit will be blocked allowing to counter attack as well.

where as the large mob of enemies will have a higher frequency of attacks on you causing the blocks per second to be higher and thus may stun lock you in unable to react. thus they keep attacking you without you able to attack back (unless you have tempest shield which then of course will end up hurting them as well)

but yes we do have the weapon swap system in this game and this is probably the best way of making use of it. a sword and shield for an aoe mass of enemy set with high block recovery, while a second set for single target block chance and take down.

but in terms of passives, you probably want both.