This healing method also works outside of Lich, but there is a trick that I discovered that works very well for maintaining your health in Lich. It involves the Transplant tree. See the following three nodes that are circled:
Transplant has a default life cost of 13% of your current health (not maximum).
The left most node “Drink Deep” makes it so that you re-heal the life back over 4 seconds (note it says “regenerated” but it really functions as “applied as healing”) and increases the cost by 50%.
The other two nodes on the right (Acolyte’s Fervor and Dance of Blood) further increase the life cost of the spell by another 60%.
This means Transplant now costs 27% of your current life [(1+0.5+0.6)x13% ]
The way it functions is you will cast the spell and lose 27% health. You will then “heal” a quarter of that 27% four times, once each second.
HOWEVER, since it is a heal, you can get gear with “heal effectiveness” (there is also 40% on the Lich Tree). If you have 100% heal effectiveness, it will double each heal. This equates to a net gain of 27% healing of your life every time you cast transplant.
If you set transplant to auto-cast you’ll just constantly get extra heals.
If you build it this way you’ll also autocast Rip blood which will further heal you.
Important note: If you have any reduced cooldown for transplant and are recasting a new transplant before the last heal finishes, they do NOT stack. So if you have 5% cooldown reduction, 100% healing effectiveness, and have it set on autocast, you will lose the fourth heal every time (resulting in a 13.5% net heal every cast of transplant). You can fix this by using the “increased cooldown nodes” on the transplant tree so that transplant cooldown is always greater or equal to 4.0 seconds.