New Build Ideas

The point of caster gear is to up your poison dagger damage. The only reason you wouldn't want that gear is if you were just going to be a melee necro with poison dagger as sort of a bonus. If you're relying on poison to do your damage, you're going to need +skills stuff to get that poison damage up.

As for low defense, you just need to keep bone armor up. It's a hit-and-run build. You stab once or twice and then back up to put bone armor back on.