Testing was with glyph of arcane blast slotted. Proc trinkets weren't equipped.

Arcane missiles

No arcane blast buff: arcane missiles hit for 1065 each

1 arcane blast buff: arcane missiles hit for 1226 each
15% increase over base

2 arcane blast buffs: arcane missiles hit for 1385 each
30% increase over base

3 arcane blast buffs: arcane missiles hit for 1545 each
45% increase over base


Arcane Barrage

No arcane blast buff: over 20 normal hits, average arcane barrage was 2630

1 arcane blast buff: over 20 normal hits, average arcane barrage was 3106
18.1% increase over base

2 arcane blast buffs: over 20 normal hits, average arcane barrage was 3573
35.8% increase over base

3 arcane blast buffs: over 20 normal hits, average arcane barrage was 4063
54.5% increase over base

Fairly small sample sizes so subject to RNG, but I think it's clear with a reasonable degree of confidence that arcane barrage isn't being buffed at 15/30/45%, looks likely to be 18/36/54%


Arcane Blast

Due to laziness I'm just testing base arcane blast and 3 stack.

0 arcane blast buffs: over 20 normal hits, average arcane blast was 2974

3 arcane blast buffs: over 20 normal hits, average arcane blast was 4553
53.1% increase over base

Chalk it up to RNG I guess, certainly not 45% increase though.


Arcane Explosion

Again, just 0 stack and 3 stack.

0 arcane blast buffs: over 40 normal hits, average arcane explosion was 1027

3 arcane blast buffs: over 40 normal hits, average arcane explosion was 1579
53.7% increase over base


To conclude, with glyph of arcane blast slotted, currently it appears:

Arcane missiles is gaining 15/30/45% damage increase.
Arcane blast, explosion and barrage are gaining 18/36/54% damage increase.

My results agree with Kavan's observations in post #411.

If someone could duplicate a couple of the tests with no glyph of arcane blast, to make sure that the glyph is actually doing something, rather than Arcane blast/explosion/barrage getting baseline 18/36/54% increase, that'd be nice.

Edit; formatting

Word is that arcane barrage 'clipping' has been hotfixed today. Assuming arcane is still the highest dps spec, it follows that our rotation would change slightly to reflect this change/fix.

I've done 'some' testing on the target dummies over an half hour time span. So far I'm finding that using the AB 3 stack on Abar, aside from mbam procs. So fairly similar to before, just without the clipping, and without the normal speed AM's.

If anyone who can do the actual math on it and would like to, would be much loved.

There's some discussion on this already on page 17, read Kavan's post (#403) onwards.

Well, currently these changes do fix one of the issues that Manly and others have referred to earlier on - they make the spec much more reactive in game, as you no longer have a set rotation to stick to at all times - you now change what you are doing depending upon missile barrage procs.

The Arcane Glyph / Arcane Missiles interaction is presumably a bug based on the fix they put into place to stop clipping, and hopefully will be fixed in the same timescales that this was hotfixed.

How this works out overall in the damage stakes will be interesting to see once folks can get some proper testing set up (And RAWR modded to accomodate the latest proposed cycle). Assuming the numbers do leave Arcane viable in terms of single target DPS, you'd hope that they took a look at the icnredibly sub-par AE and spell crit debuff issue for the spec to bring them more into line.

This deserves a thread of it's own. Getting some known addon author interested in this would be much easier if the concept was even more mapped out for them. There are some addons that either are mage specific or have roots being mage specific. Getting a known author with a mage as his/her main character to work on this project would be beneficial. With the promise of Manly spoonfeeding the equations this could be the ultimate mage raiding addon.

Christ on a bicycle, gentlemen. 3am the Hotfix is discovered, 6h later there's all flavours of badly-thought, panic posts inquiring "So is arcane dead?"

Hold on to your horses, being a Hotfix it's not clear what's exactly happened. The tooltip may not display any change irrespective of glyph, but this means only one thing for certain: That the tooltip does not display any change irrespective of glyph. There are hundreds of instances in the past and present where tooltips miss-display information.

From research which has been carried out (very quickly) up to now, it seems that it's still working as it was before, just at a cumulative 3% rather than a cumulative 5%. Personally I was expecting a hot-fix to the tune of "increases AB damage by 5%" and no buff change at all, so all in all we're not too bad.

What's the optimal cycle? Kavan just spent half a dozen posts explaining it. It never was clear-cut and it's clearly not obvious. It's looking quite a bit more logical, however. Priorities (as I understand) being:
(1) MBAM over anything
(2) ABarr provided MBAM isn't waiting to be used and AB isn't being stacked
(3) ABarr if AB Buff = 0, or AB stacked to 3, and mana restraints don't allow AB spam
(4) AB if none of the above

This reactive play-style makes much more sense than "Ignore procs of anything, just shatter combo", and I for one am very happier that the spec can now be balanced around a logical sequence of priorities/reactions rather than a mechanic-abuse that by coincidence butt-prawned any possible reaction a player may have exhibited.

And without attempting to prophesy, Kyth nailed the question on the head pretty well; it's extremely likely Arcane gains the ability to debuff 10% raid crit in the next major patch. Or at least, iScorch will show-up a lot higher in the Fire tree (it's unlikely WC will, otherwise sub-20 point frost will massively increase Blizzard DPS to the extent of eclipsing all other AoE)

I think the main question to be asked regarding arcane rotations and reactions right now is - do you use a Missile Barrage proc immediately, or do you wait until you have 3 stacks of AB? If you wait you get the full +45% extra damage, but you lose out on the chance of multiple procs from any arcane blasts you cast subsequent to that. (And Arcane Missiles currently isn't getting the extra 9% damage from the glyph). If you use it immediately, you don't miss out on any further Arcane Missile procs, but you spend more of your DPS time casting Arcane Blast with 0 or 1 rank of the debuff.

Actually there's another piece to it that you missed, the AB glyph doesn't seem to be affecting AM at all, so you get +45% to AM, while getting +54% to AB/ABar. Anyway, with the servers down now, my launcher seems to have downloaded a new patch calling itself "3.0.8a", the notes included with it refer you to the official forums for change notes, but the forums are down for maintenance currently - I suppose we'll get some actual answers there later.

I agree this seems to be an unintended effect of the hotfix to AB scaling and AM clipping. I am surprised something like this was 'hotfixed' without any Blues posting on it that I can see on the trackers.

It would be nice to get some raid benefit from a deep arcane spec, but I hope it's not something as bland as a crit debuff like the other trees have. It should be something unique to the arcane tree as long as it doesn't make raids feel forced to bring an arcane mage for min-maxing raid benefits.

edit: made this post contribute something

Removed.

Those are from the 3.08 patch notes that came out before. The patchnotes that you see on the updater are the official 3.08 ones, not 3.08a