Hi folks,
So I enjoy playing off-beat builds – strictly PvM and mostly solo – and am currently looking at Poison Dagger (PD). What a weird skill. 
Because subsequent PD attacks do not stack their poison with previous attacks, I think that IAS is only useful for the physical component of an attack (plus any non-poison magical damage and life/mana-steal from gear, etc.). Combined with the significant bonus to AR that PD confers, it therefore seems clear that the idea [against non-poison-immune targets] is to hit once, really hard. 
But to do that, of course, you have to get quite close to the target – and in all likelihood, its numerous buddies 
– and Necromancers are not exactly known for being bruisers: they kill at range.
That got me thinking about evasive rogue-type classes in other games, that melt in and out of the shadows and put their targets down with a devastating back-stab. There are actually several ways to achieve similar evasion in the Curse tree. The most obvious is Dim Vision 
, but Confuse 
, Attract 
and even Terror 
would do the trick. Cast one of those, and run around stabbing everything. For bosses, resort to Lower Resist or Amplify Damage.
Anyway, just an idea for a wacky build – really more of a playstyle because max synergies are required, regardless. Would love to hear what people think, and also to learn from their experiences and ideas for a Dagger-mancer! 
The key with PDagger is you must start restricting your skill usage because once you use Nova at all, which you are going to max, you will find using PDagger is totally useless. Thus…For my PDagger (its a challenge build) I don’t allow CE, PNova, Minnions or a melee merc. Naturally there are some Variations like if I had bramble I’d use revives just for the minions with Thorns.
I like Dim the most as it not only allows you to get in and stabby things without getting mobbed, it also shuts off the dangerous ranged attackers.
Physical damage done is very small I don’t rely on it at all or things based off it. Crushing blow or open wounds sure, but crit strikes, LL etc I don’t worry about. Repeated stabs don’t do much.
Blackbogs has an amazing slow ability, thus for bosses, I generally Decrep, Stab, Lower Resists, Stab…have a drink, call some friends, stab…
Knock back, Hit causes monsters to flee, all those normal mods that melee guys hate are your friend.
If they make IM work again, Attract/IM be a fun combo again. It works in normal and to an extent it soften things up in nightmare.
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The greatest mod a PD necro can have is Hit Causes Monster to Flee 100%. You can get this on a dagger by gambling from Lvl 20 but be prepared to spend some money. It is not a common mod. You can get HCMTF 25% easily early on and add The Face of Horror at Lvl 21 which has a similar effect.
The other thing that a PD nec needs to know is how poison sources work with this skill. Poison dagger itself is not counted as a poison source. So if you have one other poison source, damage per second (or per frame if you prefer) is added to PD damage per second, and poison length is added together. If a further poison source is addded, this results in poison length being halved, so you must only have one poison source outside PD, and it must be as long a duration as possible. Wormskull is excellent (8 seconds). The Jade Tan Do is good (180 over 5) and a perfect emerald (7 sec) is preferable to a Tal rune (5 seconds). Be aware that the damage in the character stats for poison dagger is always understated, as it merely adds PD damage to the damage from any other poison sources (and you would be crazy not to have one).
You can run normal on Players 8 pretty comfortably with a PD nec, especially using poison explosion which has quite astounding damage. but poor spread. By the time you reach nightmare, the class does not have the ability to withstand attacks to use the skill, so Nova comes into play. You can still used Blackbogs Sharp to make the occasional hit on bosses though.
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