@OP: There are several parts where you undersell the necro:
#1: DPS. The power necro has high sustained base DPS, so much so that at full buffs the necromancer will outdamage warriors with jut their auto attack. The power necro is effective at stacking might on themselves, and have several lingering attacks that they can use to layer up multiple sources of damage at once. The real shame with necro DPS is that their only cleaves come from conditions and life blast, but regardless many people find the dagger quite useful against bosses.
#2: Survivability. Life Force is really easy to get in PVE due to waves of enemies that die quickly. This makes power builds extremely durable, since the majority of the time you’ll be life blasting multiple enemies in a row. Those enemies can only damage your LF pool while doing this, and then when you clean up with the dagger + focus later, you get your life force back. One added advantage to this is that a power necro, even a bad one, will have the effect from Scholar Runes on nearly 100% of the time. On a LF build you’ll have a bubble of 14k health that enemies have to go through before you receive real damage,, and this bubble resets really quickly.
#3: Group support. The necromancer is, at its heart, a debuffer, and is capable of applying plenty of weakness, chill, cripple, boon removal, vulnerability, and immobilization. The problem, of course, is that in PVE weakness, chill, cripple, and boon removal aren’t that useful. Now, for newbies who just run around ranging everything, having enemies who are constantly crippled/chilled and immobilized is a real bonus. But for those who melee enemies, this isn’t that useful. Weakness would be good, but against regular enemies it is far inferior to blind, and bosses have reduced weakness duration (just to spite us). Boon removal is situational and spotty, and Anet designs enemies with strong boons to constantly reapply those boons (just to spite us). So, in the end necromancers are left with mostly invulnerability, which they are decent at. If only death shiver was placed somewhere else…
As far as group buffing goes, the necro does have a few tools, but these tools tend to be scattered and hard to work into a DPS build. Ritual of Protection and Spectral wall provide group protection, with Ritual of Protection usually working when you need it, where you need it. The staff can provide close quarters permanent regen as well as occasional condi cleanse and blast finishers, and bone minions can provide further blast finishers. The focus also provides regen to allies it bounces to, and the Necro has a decent, low maintenance heal in Transfusion.
#4: Epidemic. Epidemic is one of the strongest skills in the game, since it is the only skill that is a force multiplier. It makes everyone’s conditions better and longer, and it makes them in a very large AoE, and it does this every 12 to 15 seconds. It is also important to note that epidemic spreads every condition, damaging and debuffing alike. Vulnerability, weakness, burning, blind, etc, all get spread en mass, doubling in intensity or in duration.
You also seem to be under a big misunderstanding with condi necros and epidemic. Condi necros can put all the conditions they want on all the targets already. Weakening shroud, enfeebling blood, grasping dead, mark of blood, tainted shackles, chillblains, unholy feast, corrosive poison cloud, well of suffering, well of corruption, well of darkness, locust swarm, Death Nova, Death Shiver… they all work in an AoE. What you are confusing is that epidemic is capable of spreading single target conditions, which have higher durations and shorter cooldowns than AoE conditions, and are assuming that all condi necros are doing is auto attacking then using epidemic a minute later. What epidemic really does is multiply all these AoE conditions, and it does this in a much larger AoE. And it does this to other classes conditions, again in a much larger AoE than they can provide. Also, other classes can’t “put all the conditions you want on all the targets”. The only class that comes close to this is the engineer, and they don’t do it in a 600 radius. The only thing the necro needs is burning, and since every other class does burning, and burning becomes redundant as soon as two or more people do it, and with so much ambient burning around (cough Guardians Eles), not having burning becomes a non issue in a team.
