Glyph of Life Pact

[Kaibel]

So I jumped on the ptr eager to see and try out all the changes and I came across this little bad boy.

Glyph of Life Pact: Mana cost on all your spells are reduced by 30%, but Life Tap can no longer be cast, and your health will drop by 1% per sec. Your health cannot drop below 75% from this effect.

First thought: Hell yeah! not having to waste a cd on LT is fantastic, I can accept the trade off of the health penalty and hopefully my guilds healers don't get too bum hurt about it (I druid heal so I know the feel)

But then I had forgotten about/and noticed this.....

Soul Harvest: You and your demon absorb nearby wondering souls, regenerating 2% health every second while out of combat and not in an arena.

My question is; Does this make the 1% life reduction pointless unless in combat? And how severe is the penalty in a practical environment?

[Archmage Arugal]

The 1% health drain doesn't take effect until you're in combat, it's turned off the rest of the time. If I'm remembering correctly, we did some tests on it earlier in the beta and found it pretty good for Demo, but only ok for Affliction. Since Demo has periods of mana regen (meta), they never ran out of mana with the glyph. Aff is not so fortunate, instead only having a chance to regen mana during movement, so was running out of mana ~6 minutes into a fight. There hasn't been too much on it lately. Recent testing has been Mythic and people are unwilling (justified) to test a glyph that makes more work for the healers and can lead to their death

[Demoneq]

Soul Harvest: You and your demon absorb nearby wondering souls, regenerating 2% health every second while out of combat and not in an arena.

My question is; Does this make the 1% life reduction pointless unless in combat? And how severe is the penalty in a practical environment?

I guess that's the point - think of it as autocast Life Tap with no GCD? You wouldn't have it cast out of combat, after all.
(That's the way I understood it, anyway.)