Originally Posted by wind
As for the assumption that every raiding affliction warlock should have Imp. Lifetap, I strongly disagree. If you're deep affliction, you rely on dark pact, NOT on lifetap to get mana back. Lifetapping means you require healing/lose gcds using pots. As far as I'm concerned, lifetap just wastes gcd's and time that can be spent recasting dots, and I believe affliction locks only use it when they absolutely need mana that dark pacting can't provide at that particular moment. So putting 2 talent points in a talent used rarely is a bit wasteful, at least for dark pacting warlocks.
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Lifetap makes the best use out of what would otherwise be overhealing with Siphon Life. In our raids, our healers know not to bother with an affliction warlock who is only down 1 lifetap worth of health. You can weave Lifetaps into your Dark Pact/Dot/SB spam cycles such that you're never down more than 1 Lifetap worth of health and you're pretty much able to sustain constant use of the GCD indefinitely.
Dark Pact is not enough by itself to keep up with a warlock's mana usage. The pet simply doesn't regenerate enough mana. Lifetap with Siphon Life (which you should be using as a warlock anyways, see theorycrafting on Siphon Life dmg / GCD) provides effectively infinite resources. Dark Pact vs. Life Tap w/ Improved Life Tap regenerates almost the exact same amount of mana, and both use the GCD, so to say that Life Tap wastes the GCD is highly inaccurate.