Lifetap healed the damage you dealt, so in pvp it was 2/3, which yes makes it very, very inefficient and in later levels you will lifetap for less damage than a melee will hit in one round.
There are a lot of reasons Necromancers are bad but it's mostly after level 52. DoT casting times take forever and are almost immediately dispelled. Pets do very pathetic damage. Your lifetap doesn't heal for very much. It's a combination of being gimpy due to pvp server rulesets and Verant making terrible spells for necromancers post 50 due to class balance complaints. The only nuke Necromancers had was the Ignite Bones line, which resisted often in pvp due to the Skeleton illusion.
I'm pretty sure dots were nerfed 2/3 on live, and after a month of Splurt being around people stopped complaining and realized they had a good 20-30 seconds to dispel it before it started to really hurt them. The only time Splurt was great was in group pvp when optimally you could land it behind someone's buffs or count on another person to distract your target.
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