Personally, I’d put them into a Power build with boon/condition management, like one of the Signet builds these days. I’d probably advise them to be a bit glassier too, from a stats perspective, with Staff/D+F as the weapons of choice to start. Here’s a list of reasons why:
1. Power over Condi. Not because of any sort of effectiveness argument, that’s not what I’m looking for. With Power, you watch your abilities land, you see how much damage they do, and you see how that directly affects an enemy’s health pool. When they dodge, you see them dodge your abilities. You get a feel for trying to land abilities and their effectiveness. I feel like with Condis, it can be difficult to trace down what was impactful about your play when you “spam” all of your abilities, and the condis add up because the enemy didn’t dodge a few times. Suddenly they’re bleeding out and it’s like “Oh, yay!”. I’d rather a new player become familiar with the slower cast times. Plus, I feel Power has stronger interaction with Death Shroud, but that could just be bias.
2. Boon/Condi management. I don’t know how many other classes really watch boons/condis, but I would want a new player to become very familiar with watching their own conditions as well as the enemy’s boons. It’s training, and it also gives the new player a feel of the flavor of the class. You’re about messing up the enemy’s comfort and keeping those pesky conditions off, but which ones do you transfer? When do you boon strip/corrupt and when do you let it ride? Good questions for a new player to ask and dabble with.
3. Glassier over Tankier. I prefer trial by fire, personally. The glassy builds really demonstrate what can destroy an opponent and what is supplementary. You need to learn what to dodge, when to use your dodges, and how to maximize your survivability through abilities, not gear. DS management and use of things like Spectral Armor come into play here, and hopefully, the player tries to think outside the box to survive.
4. Weapons. Staff gives you a good feel for dropping AoE circles, since that seems like it happens fairly frequently as a Necro throughout their abilities. You have to learn how to use them while moving, learn you can drop them behind you, lead targets, etc. It isn’t overly difficult with Staff, and it’s pretty rewarding. Also, managing long cooldowns by timing Reaper’s Mark properly instead of just rotating through them comes into play. For Dagger+Focus, you get some boon strip, you get some long cast times, and you get effectiveness. You also get some combo potential (D3 into F4 into DS for the extra crit % on F4 hits really hard), and you ideally play around with D2 to learn when to use channeled abilities as part of your skillset.
Overall, Power is really effective, and still provides some slack when it comes to play once you learn how to manage your LF more effectively. Ideally, the new player would find some success, then get destroyed by better players, so they understand that the build can work but takes more than just brute force to really get to work well.
