Great tutorial Ducky. Your tutorials are always so well done it's great to see them on CGCookie. Not sure this will help but while I was watching the explanation of phase offset I thought I might be able to give a little of the math that makes it work. The reason your looping works with 2*pi or 4*pi (any even multiple of pi) goes back to why your rotation looping works with any multiple of 360. In math, a phase offset is used to shift trig functions by a certain angle. To make the math calculations easier the angle is measured in radians instead of degrees. It turns out that 360 degrees is equal to 2*pi radians. So any even multiple of pi is the same as a multiple of 360. That's probably clear as mud but hope it helps someone that wanted to know.
Exactly ggnorwalt
Basically...
180° = 3.14159rad = pi
So, 360° = 2*pi (a full circle or loop)
The multiplication amount in this case will donate the speed of the loop animation,
the higher the multiplier the faster the loop animation.
4*pi is twice the speed of 2*pi for example.
Check out the free pdf download - How Pi Makes a Looping Animation in Blender
Fun fact: 2*pi is also known as tau -- which is also a keyword that you can type into any Blender float field.
(Also... tau FTW 😂)