Don't get me wrong, I totally understand your point, and agree with you. However my testing on simcraft usually comes out about 600 dps lower then what they post on here due to the shorter duration, and so the actual test may come out far higher, like it did with the minor change I posted concerning the hybrid builds earlier. The main idea I was getting at though was looking at minor game play changes that we can come up with to increase our dps no matter what build we play. As the collective group comes up with these individual changes, all those little 15 point dps changes add up to 100 or 200 point increases in dps. But overall you are correct that 15 dps in and of itself in too inconsequential in real world gameplay to matter. Especially when your average dps can swing by hundreds of points from fight to fight.

Yeah, Earlier it was decided that using life tap on demand is more dps then trying to keep up the lifetap buff from the glyph. The life tap glyph is probably our highest dps boost, due to the high levels of spirit in higher levels of gear. Getting 40% of that as spell power is crazy. I have problems believing that it will stay like that through the patch, but we can only hope. It was noted though that on most fights you will life tap to full mana during breaks in the fight, but I think it will take some actual testing in real world play to see how much DPS the glyph actually equates to.

Yeah simcraft wasn't actually modeling CoD as having a cooldown at all. Now that I've fixed the resistance bug the cooldown won't ever come into play except for non-hit-capped players, but I'll add the cooldown just for completeness.

Yeah with the life tap glyph, especially if it stays at 40%, 4-piece T7 ends up being borderline overpowered. Even before getting any Ulduar gear, people will be getting 400+ extra spell power for the first 10 seconds after each life tap. With those numbers, I'm betting it'll be worth it to life tap every 20 seconds, whether you need the mana or not.

EDIT: Just to clarify, the tests showing life tapping only on demand being better were made while a) the life tap glyph was still only 20%, and b) simcraft modeled it as not benefiting from 4-piece T7.

Any way we could get a model it taking into account 4piece spirit bonus? Although since they both "activate" on life tap, the glyph buff might not take the 4pc buff since they occur at the same time. That probably would push it from the edge of overpowered into overpowered territory...

I'm curious as to what level of Ulduar gear you would need surpass the 4pc bonus. Can you quantify 4pc+LT glyph as an average SP buff?

Easily:

AverageSP = (RaidBuffedSpirit+150) * 0.4

For a very conservative raid-buffed spirit value of 600, this equals an average buff of 300 spell power - assuming you life tap every 20 seconds without fail.

300 SP from a glyph and a 4-piece set bonus, not bad. (Though it's not that easy, of course - you're life tapping more often than needed, in order to achieve perfect uptime of the glyph buff. So the cost isn't just a glyph and a 4-piece set bonus, it also costs X number of extra GCDs throughout the fight.)

EDIT: The 300 SP is what you get extra from the glyph given that you have the 4-piece bonus. If you want the reverse calculation (how much extra you get from the 4-piece bonus given that you have the glyph, which is probably the number you're looking for), see the following two posts.

4t7 gives you an average of 150 spirit, if you are lifetapping every 20 seconds, which is essentially a constant 118.5 spellpower (if the LT glyph gives you 40%).

The gain from any 2 offset pieces (or 2t7) has to be about 60 spellpower a piece.

I was reviewing the gear choices in the two chardev links (( love the fact that we are using real gear, btw )) and I can't see a single spec where the Plague Igniter is better than the Wand of the Archlich.

The Wand has 4 more spirit. So what I did was calculate
( 4 x SpiritScale + 20 x HasteScale ) - ( 24 x CritScale )

For any spec, if the answer was positive, it meant that the Wand was better. Any negative results meant the PI was better.
All calculations were positive. Is my math wrong?

As an aside, is there an option to include Lightweave as an option? Even now it seems to be neck-and-neck with +Haste as an enchant but the change in 3.1 is going to see a big bump in usefulness. Or is that covered with the flat +75sp for professions?

As an aside from the aside, a quick search of the code base for "optimal_raid" showed a number of buffs being applies to the player in sc_player.cpp but nothing in sc_pet.cpp. Is that because buffs are *not* applied to pets? I was sure that they were but couldn't prove it.

The pet_t class is a derivative of player_t, and as such inherits the "combat_begin()" callback that initializes the raid buffs.

I went ahead and made all the profiles life tap every 20 seconds to keep the glyph buff up. It's a pretty significant DPS boost for all specs, so I updated the OP with the new results.

Does lifetapping every 20 seconds award enough mana to not have to take mana reduction talents for a "dps" increase?