First off, I agree: we ought to play a character, not a spreadsheet.
That said, navigating necro’s traits and skills to find the playstyle you want, and then combining it with the right gear to make those choices effective, can be challenging due to the myriad variety of possible gear stat combinations.
Sheobix has a great simple spreadsheet method on his site:
http://necronotes.blog.com/2013/01/01/sheos-calculation-method-taught-in-5-minutes/
But it got me to thinking that it would be nice to have a spreadsheet that already contained all the gear choices, so I could easily choose them from dropdowns.
Well, I found one. SatireV has one on Google Docs, which is pretty comprehensive and must’ve taken a crapload of work to put together.
Here’s the reddit thread, which has the Google Docs link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/136aa7/pve_gear_calculatorefficiency_optimizer/
He also has a separate blog post from a few days earlier, which seems to point to an earlier version of the spreadsheet:
http://guildwars2.mmmos.com/?page=view&id=4048&title=pve-gear-calculatorefficiency-optimizer-spreadsheet-almost-all-pve-gear-included-with-some-theorycraft
I’ve downloaded them and, although I haven’t had time to check everything for errors, it looks pretty amazing. Nice thing is that if there is an error, or you want to add some special piece of gear, you can do so on the appropriate sheet. I also scanned with 2 AV programs and they seem to be clean.
Although the spreadsheet is for all classes, I only really care about necro, so that’s why I’m posting it here.