Following the Frost thread by Norri, I’d like to make one for Arcane as well.
In general, I appreciate that Blizzard has identified the Barrage conditionals as being too convoluted. The goal of simplifying them to something more similar to the release state of the spec is exactly the direction in which the spec should go.
Having said that, the changes proposed will cause more issues than they solve. The whole point of the pre-.5 rotation is that you had a well-defined point in time when to barrage. There was some opportunity to stack buffs going into that moment, but it was much more limited and generally just not worth it because of how narrow the window of time was.
Aethervision lasting 12 seconds will never replicate that behavior (unless it’s overwhelmingly strong) - we will always have other conditionals like Harmony stacks, or even reacting to TA procs (e.g., can I fit in a Barrage in this Arcane Surge proc, but not an Arcane Blast?). In fact, removing the double stacking of NP and AV might bring more importance to those other conditionals and make barrage use more convoluted, not less. Additionally, sometimes you only have one stack of AV rather than two, which will get in the way of triggering Splintering Sorcery.
The other much more fundamental problem is in any multi-target situation. NP benefiting Barrage greatly helped in aoe and cleave because now it makes sense to cycle clearcasting and NP stacks into more and stronger barrages. If Barrage no longer benefits from NP, then that cycle is broken and we’re back to the DF-style rotation of praying for orb procs and spamming AE otherwise, except now AE doesn’t even interact at all with our hero trees.
Arcane is really complicated and unpredictable but the only two ideas I can think of to fix this are a) make barrage benefit from NP, or AV, but not both and/or b) make AE interact with the hero trees, e.g. by generating Spellfire spheres and consuming NP to generate splinters.