Okkum

That's what my necromancer's build will be, or very similar to it anyway.

MY advice is to change it only a little though, because the ONE unique thing necromancers bring to a group is the following:

I'd say they are the best class to build for power/precision/crit damage, WHILE trying to maximize their up-time and variety of Utilitarian Conditions. That is to say, its easy for a necromancers to stack some VERY useful condtions while doing their normal damage role, especially Vulnerability.

For 100% condition duration, you have the following to work with:

30% potential from Traits, 40% potential from Food (Rare Veggie Pizza), 20% from Giver weapons (10%x2), 20% from Armor Rune combinations (10% from Lyssa, 10% from either Nightmare (expensive) or 4 Lich i think it is) = 110%, It caps at 100% though, so you have some wiggle room.

Now, this is only if you want the maximum up time on ALL conditions you do. If you are primarily concerned with specific condition durations, you can stack any combination of the +10% to Specific Condition Sigils on your weapons.

For example, lets say you dont want to use Giver weapons since they will provide inferior damage stats, but you absolutely want 100% uptime for your Vulnerability stacks, you could use 2 10% Vulnerability duration Sigils and have 80% to all (which is still fantastic) and 100% to Vulnerability.

Or in our case, since we have 110%, you could use say 1 Vulnerability and 1 Chill, to get 100% in chill and Vulnerability, which I believe are our two strongest conditions for utility.


Additionally, with your traits, I would change the Blood line to something else. That trait is terrible in isolation. The dagger cooldown might be useful if you find yourself in constant need of Immobilization, Life Siphon, OR which to run dual-daggers for the useful Weakness if offhand dagger that will last VERY long with at or near 100% condition duration. At 100% duration against non-champions it lasts 20 seconds with a 21.5 second cooldown with the dagger reuse time.

Focus's chill would last 10 seconds on a 16 second cooldown, along with Spectral Grasp's lasting 8 seconds on 24 second cooldown if traited for spectral cooldowns, which i certainly would change your "deathshroud cooldowns" to "spectral cooldown reduction," since we dont get too much out of having lower cooldowns in DS. This also lower's spectral wall, one of your better skills for stacking vulnerability.

Speaking of DS, popping in every 5 seconds or to avoid huge damage is a good trick, also, it has good ranged damage for when you need to hang back potentially to complement Axe's autos and damage, until you dip below 50% and lifeblast starts sucking. Also, Dark Path is another excellent source of Chill at 10s Chill with only a mere 15 second cooldown (only lowered to 12.75 with trait, not worth the trait imo).


So with a Axe Focus / Dagger Dagger set up you have access to:

Tons of Vulnerability stacking, 100% easily accessible Chill Stacking, strong but not 100% Weakness on bosses but near 100% on nonchamps, good but not amazing potential safe damage with Axe / Death Shroud from range, and powerful but not ridiculous damage in melee with Dagger Dagger, and some brief regeneration and condition removal with off-hand dagger and foci, and boon removal.

I'd love someone to tell me that this ISNT a useful skill set for any serious dungeon content in the game. I strongly believe this build would pull its own weight even in highly organize DPS-focused speed clears simply due to it having "respectable" damage while maintaining 25 vulnerability in bursts and 14ish reliably consistently, along with the aforementioned Chill and Weakness. There are some bosses that prevent players from damaging them during certain abilities, or at least make it very risky to do so, so Chill is incredibly effective here. Weakness is less so, since ideally you CAN avoid almost every bit of damage in the game with enough knowledge and skill (that i personally dont have, ask Strife lol). Still, no one is perfect, AND the potential of literally halving the damage from a boss that could have otherwise one shot, is invaluable.



EDIT:

Alternatively, thinking about it, if you go rune of Lyssa x2, rune of Mad King x2, and rune of Svarnir (or other 20% "frozen" (chill) duration rune of your choice based on cheepness), then you could get 100% chill easier, and then stack the two 10% (for 20%) Vulnerability Sigils .

This could save you significant cost on your food, resulting in:

30% Traits + 40% Runes/Sigils = 70% for Chill and Vulnerability. We can never reach 100% Weakness, ESPECIALLY on bosses, so that certainly is an option if you want to skip using off-hand dagger.

The remaining 30% could be achieved with the much cheaper food, Super Veggie Pizza, at 36% duration. Or you could use Giver Weapons, giving up significant power and crit chance and crit damage, to have 20% more condition duration.

This would give you 90% to all conditions are all times even without food, and allow you to eat Omnom Berry Bars for additional 40% coin drop from bosses and general foes, which is really hard to pass up. But you are sacrificing damage and 10% duration to do so!

Both have their perks

Sorry, but the staff for necros is good enough that I wouldn't want to trade it for two sets with mainhands/offhands.  Scepter is conditions, axe is vulnerability (and I've heard it's been buffed but it was extremely weak before so I'm not going to say it's a great option), daggers are melee, and staff is long range utility/generic aoe damage (some direct, some condition).

So if you don't want to use a staff, you're going to either be going melee on one set, or using conditions.  And axes don't cause any condition damage ticks.  This is why staffs are common for necros, they play nicely in most builds.  Well that and they do decent damage and are good utility.

I have to say, I think you'd be better off with a GS +Sword/focus mesmer as Kitsune said.