Since in long fights the worst part about being demo is that you spend so much time lifetaping, I was wondering if having trinkets like Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon and other chance on hit/spell cast that regen mana would be any good to help with the lifetapping problem.

Let's take your demonology warlock with 0/5 demonic embrace, raidbuffed (+50 from divine spirit +20 blackened basilisk, 18 from motw, +10% from human bonus, +10% from bok)

160 (this is your average, naked base spirit at 70 as ctprofiles claims to) + 50 +18 +20 =248
248*1.2=297

Round up to 300, take another 80 from gear (even if 50 spirit from a spelldmg/hit/crit gear might be more then you may ever dream off), round up again to 400 spirit.

Now let's use [Bangle of Endless Blessings] + [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon], reaching 12% chance for meditation. You a a smart warlock doing 25 casts per minute, ending in 3 meditation states at perfect interval of 45s (generously 23 ticks)

400/5+15*0.15*23*=327 mana/minute

Wow, thats awsome! Losing 2 trinketslots for this huge amount of mana per minute :/

So, as you may see, this is no real option. What can you do?

a) get a personal healer
b) get a shadowpriest for your group
c) sacrifice your felhunter or your voidwalker (check your hp:mp ratio and deside)
d) use more consumeables to restore mana
e) you allready reached the maximum possible, congratulation!
f) be smart, use bandages
g) drop lology and learn affliction for darkpact :/

You lose many of the great deep Demon talents if you sac.

Using consumables is a great idea.

For a Lock, it should be better to Drain Life (1600ish damage and 2000ish healing) vs Bandaid (2500 healing). However you get a spirit tic (yah 129 mana!) out of the bandaid usage.

With SL and Dark Pack mana isn't that much of an issue, but that Demonology is a fair raid spec (but is the lowest raid dps tree).

Another option is to craft the Frozen Shadoweave sec, it gives about 400 HP/minute, so that is a free life tap every 2 minutes.

Spend so much time lifetapping? What do you mean?

Are you saying demo has greater mana usage than Affliction or Destro?
Or are you saying you can't afford to life tap due to health concerns?

The first just strikes me as being wrong; all warlock specs need to get mana - and even dark pacters need to lifetap in long fights.
The second is a problem for destro locks even more, as they usually have less health than demo.

So I don't understand what you think your specific concern is. If it's just a general "should warlocks use mana regen stuff?" then the answer has been covered. Life Tap is about 3 million times more awesome than mana regen: it is our mana regen of choice by far. You just need to accept it.

Heavy Netherweave Bandage
Requires First Aid (325)
Use: Heals 3400 damage over 8 sec.

Using specced (he's a demonology lock so i assume the has 3/3 demonic aegis) fel armor, he receive 4080 hp while not taking damage over 8s or 510 hp/s.

Drain Life is a quite nice idea, but you may forgot about something in here. Ok, damage dealing is fine - but you'll have some more mana for it, missing while tabbing. You can choose between 8s of non dealing damage and 4k hp without any mana costs (you allready mentioned the great mana reg from spirit tick(s)), able to tab more often.

With Drain Life and 1000 spelldamage you receive 208 dps & 262 hp/s or 1040 dmg & 1310 hp in total (including fel armor with its talents) for 425 mana.

If you pick sl how you can't reach dp and turned around the same thing. And with dp you won't reach all the quite nice demonology talents worse not sacrificing your pet as you mentioned above. But you can pick siphon life instead of Ruin if you want to, quite nice hp reg for only 2 global cooldowns every minute (but again a massive lose to your dps imho).

5% crit
150-200 spelldmg
-20% threat or +10% dmg

vs ~ 6k hp regged should allways be on top, i have to agree - but he's lacking mana so he can't make right use of them all the time.

Since the longest boss fights in game atm are 8-9 minutes, and there are threat cap issues for most fights, it really is not a big deal lifetapping 2-3 times and then drain lifeing it back up. Be glad you are playing the warlock class, mages and shadow priests have no mana regen options other than potting for fights like Gruul and Hydross.

There are also no real patchwerk fights so far in TBC where you just go all out DPS for 5 minutes, most of the time you start out slow, ramp up a bit, and really only go all out the last few 2-3 minutes. Its pretty easy to regulate your mana/HP so that you can hit the critical last few minutes with full hp/mana and do insane burst damage tossing out shadowburns.

And yeah, trinket slots should be saved for these burst times (icon, quag, shiffer, etc) instead of trying to regen a pitiful amount of mana. We have lifetap, learn to love it.

What? Maybe without the pet demonology is about even with other specs, but if you can use your FG to his full potential, no spec can come close.

As for lifetap, tell your priests to drop you a renew once in a while. His mana will pay off when you show him how much more damage you did than the mages and hunters because they ran out of mana.

Why? We're still progressing through karazhan, but I've been allowed to use my FG whenever, only using an imp on maiden and curator.

You do make a good point, though. I've considered respeccing to a DS build or affliction so I can have the imp out all the time. The DPS potential of demonology is just too apealing.

addicted to the hp of the imp. I guess its just a trait from pre BC..and with this all being progress nowadays, every HP helps.

Having just completed my suit..I am tempted to try 0/40/21, 0/41/20 and 21/0/40.

in your opinion would you say the dps potention of demo is the best of the three specs?

Do you love the imp? If so, 1/39/21 should work best for you (1 in corruption to makes it a 1.4sec cast, so you don't lose much by casting it).

If you don't mind missing the imp, try 1/41/19, that is more potential dps than the first one, FG is powerful if you keep it alive.

21/0/40? I assume you mean 21/40, that is the weakest spec of the three (using Incinerate instead of SB?), but you would have better corruptions and SL for mana efficiency on long fights.

Is anyone 30/21/10? I really wonder about the dps of this build. There is always the problem of being forced to use your imp but 30/21 was a solid build pre-bc and I'm curious how it would do with 25% shadowdamage + bane shadowbolts.