I see multiple gameplay loops and all that, 99% of Arcane mage guides say you should Double Barrage and Missile during Arcane soul. But I deal significant more damage if I just spam barrage? I did severals tests and the best result I got was to spam barrage into 3s remaining and missile before the last 2 barrages. (During encounter and Overall, my damage was better that way)
Does anyone else have this disparity when playing in Arcane Soul?
Are you canceling AM early? If you’re gonna use that degenerate playstyle that leverages the NP proc from AM you need to use a macro or some kind of third party software to cancel AM early otherwise you’re wasting the Arcane Soul window. FYI, this is not the intended playstyle. Blizzard just want you to spam ABarr for the entire duration. I really hope that they do away with NP altogether because it leads to these unintuitive and gimmicky playstyles.
Yes, every other guide I see you press AM and immediatly starts jumping/pressing Barrage twice and AM again
Holy crap dude…
It’s gonna happen, they’ve been angling that way for a while now. They need to pull the ripcord on NP because the sweats can’t handle the temptation to abuse it and are ruining the spec for all the normal folks. No one can seriously claim that it’s intentional design to truncate a channeling spell just for the damage buff it provides. This madness needs to end!
I think you’re looking at two different things and treating them as one issue.
Nether Precision is perfectly fine talent. It adds some much needed spice to our otherwise bland rotation (which, historically, was basically “cast one spell forever”). It is very clearly a core mechanic of the spec now, and I doubt they’re going to be removing it.
The real problem is that Arcane Missiles are severely undertuned. We need to cast them to get the Nether Precision buff, but we don’t want to complete them because they don’t do enough damage.
Nether Precision sets up the problem, but is itself not the problem. It looks to me like Blizzard tried to fix the issue with Arcane Debilitation, but it just doesn’t quite reach the levels we would need. In order to fix the “unintended playstyle” that is clipping Arcane Missiles, Blizzard either needs to increase the damage that missiles does or incentivize us more to complete the channel (Blizzard, if you read this, please note that I said “incentivize us more to complete the channel” and not “disincentivize us more to not complete the channel.” There’s a big difference between the two).
Getting back to the topic at hand, if you’re testing this out in the real world (as in, not on dummies), make sure that both test cases are identical. One potential issue is if the mob you’re attacking is below 35% health, triggering Arcane Bombardment. If it is, that case is going to be doing 130% more damage.
Personally, I haven’t quite figured out which method I prefer. I’m sure there are number crunchers who can answer that (i.e. the guides) but there’s also a difference between damage and feel - sometimes I absolutely go with the style that feels better if it’s not going to be a huge difference in damage.
If all the damage multipliers on Barrage are additive (as in, the all add together for one total sum) and none are multiplicative (as in, add all the additives together and THEN multiply by the multiplicative), some napkin math at a glance to me looks like it could be beneficial to weave in some missiles when the target is above 35% health, but NOT beneficial to do so when they’re below the threshold. But that also makes some assumptions on how our damage amplifiers work - something I could be extremely wrong about.
That’s semantics. If you want to get really technical about it, the players are the problem because they’re abusing NP in a way it clearly wasn’t meant to be used. The reason NP exists is precisely to makeup for the lackluster damage of AM. Yes, they could certainly buff AM’s damage but in order to make it numerically worthwhile to let the entire channel finish naturally without truncating it early it would have to be buffed to unprecedented numbers and that will have a ripple effect both in PvP and PvE making it a nightmare to balance. By spreading out the extra damage onto your next two spells that issue is resolved albeit in a not very elegant way.
The bottom line is that as long as there is some way to minmax, however degenerate and clearly unintended, some people will find ways to leverage it but the game can’t be balanced around that because not everyone wants to subject themselves to a playstyle like that and, frankly, the vast majority of players don’t even grasp these nuances to begin with, hence the advent of the one button helper.
Personally, I don’t see how this can be reconciled easily but after two decades the game is in dire need of simplification, pruning, and streamlining and as far as I am concerned NP is a great candidate for that. Furthermore, if Blizzard really do go through with completely dismantling addons I would love to see how the proponents of these degenerate playstyles will manage without them. Because I’ve seen them struggle on the PTRs without them and it’s not pretty.
It’s certainly the right move, though, because a AAA game that has a monthly subscription model in addition to $$$ expansion packs should be playable as is out of the box without having to download an entire suite of third party addons that are not cosmetic but provide baseline game functionality. It’s a major barrier for entry and in the long term is losing Blizzard a ton of money from potential customers who would play the game if it was easier to get into. Activision may have been fine with that but Microsoft isn’t and these changes will go through and sooner rather than later, all you have to do is look at other games they’ve acquired and it’s evident.
Arcane is in probably one of the best places it’s been in a decade or so. If Blizzard actually cared that much about “what Blizzard designs vs. what the players come up with” then Arcane Missiles would’ve already been changed to only provide Nether Precision when the channel ends, not when it starts (which is what my parenthetical text in my previous comment was about).
In earlier versions of the game, players purposely cast lower level versions of the spells they had available to them because it was simply more efficient. Blizzard probably thought it was neat that players spent that much time trying to figure that out.
The bottom line here, in this post, is that OP wants to know how to more correctly minmax their damage (even if you think minmaxing in an RPG is degenerate) because the suggested rotation isn’t working out the way they expect.
Wowhead’s guide and Icy Veins’ guide don’t seem to have the same talking points here. Wowhead’s suggests that we WANT to weave some missiles into our rotation while Icy Veins does not. It’s also worth noting that Wowhead hides that suggestion under the “advanced” section.
I can’t say I understand Porom much (the guide writer for Arcane for Wowhead) but I do know that they are very good at sims. My guess here is that it’s likely more beneficial to weave missiles in during arcane soul, but the difference between weaving and not weaving is likely not significant. Possibly single digit percentage points or less. If one way works better than the other for you, do that.
That said, if you really want a better answer, you can attempt the Altered Time discord server. I usually find it to be quite an awful place for trying to look up details but it can be a fantastic resource when you have a question to ask that can’t be answered easily on the forums (like this one).
I’m seeing a conversation on there right now where it looks like someone was asking what they were doing wrong. Turns out they were trying to go Barrage -> Barrage -> Missiles -> Repeat during their Arcane Soul window but were actually more commonly going Barrage -> Missiles -> Repeat, missing an important Barrage cast.
I’ve been trying to gauge on my own (haven’t looked at my logs this week) which version I like better, but I definitely didn’t feel a big difference one way or the other. If you feel more powerful doing the easier rotation, it might be worth checking your own logs to see if maybe you missed something. I’m pretty sure on at least one occasion I thought I was doing everything right before I realized I hadn’t actually cast any missiles…
This is what I was thinking.
Agree here as well. He’s obviously a skilled player who clears mythic raids every tier and has a higher m+ score every season than I do, so I’m certainly not going to say he’s wrong. But I notice several times his character gearing, talents and stats DON’T match what he put in his own guide. 
I genuinely think they don’t know how to do that and/or the decades old spaghetti coding won’t allow for it. Otherwise they would have 100% done it by now. That or as you say they just don’t care but they certainly seemed to care quite a bit, earlier on in TWW, with the double dipping fiasco.
But the underlying issue here is that these playstyles should not be possible in the first place and you shouldn’t need to spend hours researching how a spec works online and then spend even more time hunting down, installing, and configuring addons. The fact that this has basically become the default for this game should be worrying to everyone.
Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to take it for granted while others actually revel in the fact that this is the status quo and that being in the know gives them an edge over other players. Which, not so coincidentally, is also why new players quit the game before they even start. The sooner Blizzard even the playing field by removing addons and simplify the game to make up for what was previously handled by third party software, the better everything will be. But the transition period is gonna be rough because they let this take root for so long.
That’s because being good at something doesn’t automatically mean you can also teach others, yet many people seem to think they can which inevitably leads to a lot of confusion.
I don’t know whether he does that or not but a lot of top players actually change out their talents and even gear on purpose before they log off, ostensibly to keep others from copying them.
He knows what sims the highest, but it doesn’t mean that he’s been able to acquire the gear the sims recommend. To be fair, I think his guides always suggest simming, and considering that the difference between “BiS” and “Second BiS” could be .1%. Having even just one non-bis item could easily make all the other recommendations no longer the best possible item to equip.
Three points for you:
No, I can’t believe you actually posted something like that.
Bro’s out here chaining nothing but m0s for a month and writing novels on spec design hurting his performance. golfclap
They could always just make arcane soul a x number of barrage instead of a window.
This would make it so you could fully cast arcane missiles.
But it would also probably hurt haste scaling.
Or they could add another condition to arcane soul which would make the arcane missiles channel go significantly faster, basically within GCD.
I personally really like arcane soul
Do you want Rune of Power back? I’m not a key pusher either but he and I have both been screaming about poor design to occasional positive effect lol - clearly someone read these forums at that juncture
Keep telling yourself that.
If by this you mean they change something you don’t like after 8-10 years, then yes it had an effect. Realistically, they don’t pay much if any attention to the forums, which in many cases is a good thing.
Two sentences are a novel now? I know people don’t read much anymore but that’s just sad. 
Anyway, the fact that I don’t engage in M+ anymore does not mean I didn’t before nor that I don’t know what I am talking about. In fact the reason I don’t engage with that content anymore is precisely because the design direction has been headed in the wrong direction for years now. Just because you’ve adopted to it and don’t mind warping your playstyle doesn’t mean others are willing to do the same or that their feedback is irrelevant.
What is so controversial about it? That’s literally what you have to do and it’s completely unintuitive for a new player, nor should it be necessary to play the game effectively and yet it is and has been for years.