Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying here.
But it sounds to me like in the past you have been putting sp's in other places besides resist dueling skills and using them for jobs, etc, and relying on equipment to provide sps for dueling skills.
And now with the change to be a top dueler and compete at the same level you are going to have to use not only top equipment but actually use your sps for dueling instead of other things.
Whats wrong with that? I am a shooter. All of my sps go to dueling skills and I use the best equipment I can. Why should resist have to be any different than that.
With this change the days of resist ruling the range using part of their sps for dueling, relying on equip and an Hernando's are over as it should be.
Want to be a top dueler competitive dueler your going to have to do like top shooters have had to do all along. Put those sps to dueling and forget about everything else.
Perhaps I can explain it better. It's not that I do not want to put skills into dueling, it's more that the maximum amount of skills available for melee is now a lot less
compared to the ranged counter part.
In the past, I would move my SPs around to either match a dueler or skills for a job/quest as needed to get the job done. But a major benefit to this was to using top gear in the process because it would add the most skills to dueling as possible to your setup.
The problem I am having is that in order to remain competetive, top gear now- focusing on dodge in a melee build- is not similar or even close to being equal to the amount of skills provided by top gear for a ranged or even traditional melee resistance. There simply isn't much effective gear out there that takes vigor, aim, and dodge into consideration at the same time like there is for aim, shooting, dodge, appearance, or aim, vigor, toughness, reflex. You end up needing to use a ized set of gear crossing between ranged and melee which makes the overall amount of skill points added by gear at a severe disadvantage to the amount of effective skill points available to a ranged fighter.
An example of this, was where I showed (or attempted to) the best gear combination i could find (which is why i asked about it) for melee incorporating dodge verses melee incorporating resistance had a difference of 76 or so skill points added to the effective dueling skills. This is taking the amount of skills added by a traditional melee top gear which is about 178 sp, verses just 111 now. In real terms, that's similar to an 14-18 player level advantage in the amount of skill points available to tweek your build compared to a ranged dueler or traditional melee resistance gear.
With a difference that large, you will either need to be extremely lucky or be the top dueler over fort fighters, low level players, and workers only. Any pure dueler using ranged and top gear seemingly has a 15 level comparative advantage minimum because of the gear combination's available for that build before we even take into consideration the loss of effectiveness of applying attributes to strength or mobility compared to dexterity after the update.
That's a another severe disadvantage too. With resistance being nerfed, it's like a shooter placing attribute points into strength to get a health bonus where it even after the charisma nerf, a shooting and aim combination is benefited greatly by move attributes to to dexterity and there is nothing as potent of a combination for melee any more.