It's strange that life reservation efficiency requires investing in mana reservation efficiency

Right now on the passive tree, builds which require life reservation efficiency must take an aura mastery cluster.

For aura stackers and aura supports this is fine - they take all the aura clusters, and life reservation efficiency acts as a way to magnify their build's power by reserving even more auras on life.

All other builds which do not reserve mana have no way to access life reservation efficiency. It seems weird that a build needing life reservation efficiency should have to invest in mana reservation efficiency.

This means for a bunch of builds, they have to make the tradeoff of taking 3+ dead passives to access any life reservation efficiency at all.

If life reservation efficiency were divided a bit more, or were available on life mastery instead of aura mastery, this would not be a problem. Most aura builds take some life nodes anyway, even if just via pathing.

Devs addressed this when they made the big changes to reservation:

" The vast majority of Reservation Efficiency offered is now Mana-specific in order to prevent reserving both Life and Mana being the default choice for a build heavily invested in Reservation."

Basically, there were a negligible amount of builds that only reserved life. If they made life-specific wheels it would be abused just as before, except possibly in reverse.

Depends where you are on the tree. If you are CI, you need 1 dead node because Influence (next to CI) still helps you.

If you are in the lower left area though (the other place I feel people might reserve life), Champion of the Cause and the node next to it are generic (both life and mana) reservation efficiency.