What expansion if any should Necromancers start being treated as a legitimate DPS class instead of..

Im curious if you were doing naggy/vox out of era since twitch isnt even a thing in classic. Also, were you doing these with SUPER low numbers? I dont remember ever having a problem with mana, even in classic and ESPECIALLY at level 60 doing naggy and vox.

I mained a necro on aradune from launch through mid GoD, with a top euro guild and then switched to berserker for obvious reasons but i can tell u i noticed the following trends which imo are the main factors for the necro's potentially deteriorating dps compared to melee over expansions.

Actually, there is only one main factor which is "encounter duration", which over the course of these expansions became highly biased towards melee mainly due to the disciplines which because of their power eventually started to last as long (or short) as the duration of the encounter...

Kind of why i love my zerk now.

So when necro's shined during classic upto luclin it was mainly because we got the time to "rotate" nearly all our good DoTs´, while throwing in some extra lifetaps ending up oom after most bosses.

And so eventough we're all about DoTs, a DoT is only worth it's cast time and mana if it can run close to it's full duration... If not we're forced to resort to our lifetaps which drain even our mana to 0 quickly. And eventually, even on boss fights, so called "rotations" didn't even apply anymore.

So in each expansion, the better a guild performed and started killing bosses faster, the less time necro's had to really show their strength, add to that the trash mobs eventually died so fast u could be lucky if u get a wee lil, high mana costing lifetap off, ending up with low mana before they pull the next boss....
Because who cares about a necro's "unlimited" mana pool right? its true we had like double the mana regen with lich at the start but that only lasted a few expansions.

And eventough necro's were doing great those 1st few expansions, it took all our mana and a lot of effort to be able to compete (a high parsing necro is probably the most intensive task in all of everquest)

So unless ur in a small guild, or doing splits with the minimum of players, resulting in long encounters and med times, a necro will kind of suck.

Because Necros on live are killing it from what i can read i can only imagine that in future expansions necro's will aquire comparable burst damage AA's/spells as my eq2 necro had when i mained that on eq2 live for a long time (and topped nearly all parses)