The point is not the loss of your HP, if you Life Tap, but rather the point, that you're wasting a GCD for mana, that you don't really need.

You don't use Life Tap for the buff, you use it because you need mana. The difference is that it is beneficial to wait at least 20s between taps. I think the only comparison ever made was between simcraft's old behaviour of only using it when not having enough mana to cast some spell and using it every 20s. Using it every 20s was more dps than the old behaviour.

The optimal solution would probably be ending the fight with (approx.) 0 mana but with a constant amount of time between all taps. [And using a rank1 LT just before the pull.]

Doesent make any sense


You are not only looking at the spelldamage component, if you intent to keep LT glyph as 13/58 you need to calculate the lost dps time as well as the gain from immolate or incinerate glyph versus the spellpower gain from LT glyph

I was under the impression ever since we learned about the Glyph of Lifetap that it is specifically used for the buff. If you only lifetap when you need the mana, why bother using the glyph at all? I use rank 1 lifetap in my normal spell priority list and when my mana gets below 30% I get a warning and then I switch the highest rank lifetap for a few cycles. The whole point to using the Glyph is for the spellpower increase and because of that, you want to tap every 20 sec. exactly so you have the highest buff uptime possible. I fail to understand when people suddenly forgot this?!

When Soul leech allowed us to almost completely drop Lifetap from the rotation.

This is simply wrong. You're doing it wrong!

All specs that exclude improved soul leech spend enough mana to warrant the requirement of lifetapping every 20 seconds (IE: If you lifetap every 20 seconds, you don't regenerate more mana than you consume). That is why Glyph of Life Tap is great for non Soul Leech specs- because you need to do those life taps anyway for the mana, you're not wasting global cooldowns just to get the buff.

This is also why it's not great for replenishment (Improved Soul Leech) specs, because although they do spend a lot of mana, they regenerate a ton of mana through ISL, and as a result do not actually need to lifetap every 20 seconds to sustain their own mana pool. As a result, if they do waste those extra global cooldowns on lifetaps with glyph of lifetap- they lose DPS when compared to glyph of immolate/incinerate + lifetap as needed.

Simcraft uses different sets of gear, dependent upon whether or not the spec has 3 points in suppression. So in this case, 0/13/58 with an extra 3% hit used in the itemization of gear is still slightly more dps than 3/13/55 without wasting that itemization on the extra 3% hit.

The irony of this Glyph debate is that it's taking place on a SimCraft Thread where we have the very tool needed to confirm which Glyphs are optimal.

I can see both sides of the debate but think I can explain where we are as:

"The Life Tap Glyph was never just about the Spellpower buff: it was compensation for DPS lost in the action of maintaining one's mana pool. With Improved Soul Leech the Warlock can avoid the need to use Life Tap and will get more benefit from the Immolate Glyph".

If still in doubt run SimCraft for 0/13/58 but substitute the Immolate Glyph for the LT Glyph (LT Rank1 tapping every 20s for the buff regardless of Mana) and post the numbers!

If you convert 3% hit + "Destructive Reach" and "Shadow Burn" (neither of which are considered DPS talents) to crit, you get something like:
- 3 * 26.23 = 78,69 "extra stat points". These can be spent on crit, haste, spirit, or spellpower- really dependant on wether you gear or gem away the difference. Either way, the difference will at best be worth 78.69 / 16 * 19 * 1.49 = 140 DPS in favor of the supression build (There's not really anything that you'd gain more from in terms of stat conversion than spellpower through gems, so 140 is possibly high).

So what does Improved Soul Leech have to do? Basically it needs to make up for 140 DPS.

What follows is an extremely rough theory craft that should by no means be considered accurate(!) Lets take Ulduar gear dps levels as an example, that's 7690 DPS (best case scenario), and the DPET of our filler (incinerate) 6202 DPS (worst case scenario). 14.8% haste from gear, 8% from raid buffs. Making our lifetap 1.5/1.228=1.22s.

It takes us [x] seconds of 140 dps regain the damage lost from a lifetap:
7690*1.22 (Damage lost from a lifetap)/140=67
6202*1.22 (Damage lost from a lifetap)/140=54

We have 448 spirit from gear, 80 from prayer of spirit, 52 from (improved) Gift of the wild = 580, add BoK and we get 638 Spirit raid buffed. We do not have 4xT7, so no spirit buff coming in anywhere. The size of a lifetap is thus 1490 + 3x638=3404

So if improved Soul leech regenerates 3404 mana every 54 to 67 seconds, we're benefitting from improved soul leech more than suppression. This does not account for the difference in glyphs- just talents. However I can tell you that at these gear levels ISL should have no problem generating 3404 mana every minute or so.

Forgive me for my benightedness, I really should take the time to learn to use the simcraft for myself; however, I'm curious if anyone ran numbers for any of the 0/30/40 + 1 builds that take both MD and SnF into account. I seem to recall praise of the builds in 3.0.9? though numbers later seemed to lean heavier towards the FG/Ember builds. I don't recall if there was just poor scaling or what, but has anyone checked to see if they are anywhere close to being competitive recently or w/ the new changes coming up in the next patch?

I have no qualms if the builds are subpar, I simply don't know. It just always seemed like the two talents in conjunction had a certain potential. Any foresight the number crunchers can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Im wondering, what exactly is the gear point in which the 0/13/58 overrules 3/13/55? Is it 2p8.5 or 4p8.5? I wonder because i already have my 14% hit from current gear, and see no reason to put myself 3% over hit cap raid buffed? Its possibly i could techically drop about 1% hit from a gem and an enchant but thats really getting minuscule now. And i have to agree with the above poster, that the lifegain survivability from 0/13/58 almost just makes me wanna go that route instead despite the 100dps loss from simcraft. There have been many fights where i can simply nuke my way through my low health, instead of resorting to significant dps losses such as Drain life. Makes me want to know what the dps is like if i swap out 2peices of 7.5 with ilvl226 gear (which is backpacked)

On another thought. Since i gain absolutely nothing basically from the +3% hit in suppression, couldnt i just roll 0/13/58 and couple it with LT glyph until i get the gear to remove LT glyph? Wouldnt that basically be the same thing except i get the advantage of never needing LT if i get in a situation where its to dangerous to use.