Friend of mine had a neat suggestion. The only problem is, I don’t know if this would impact PvE (this change was almost certainly made for PvE reasons I’d imagine, so it’s important that PvE’ers like the idea. Disclaimer: I only PvP).
The name for the new talent fits perfectly with this idea: Tactical Reload. Just an OFF GCD cooldown (30? 45 seconds? 60 seconds? whatever seems balanced, I’m not sure).
Tactical Reload: Instantly resets your Rapid Fire cooldown and increases it’s damage by 10-20% ? (whatever is deemed balanced, or perhaps just a reset with no damage bonus, I’m not sure).
If it’s off GCD, I think PvE’ers wouldn’t be as annoyed with it as with Double Tap (it honestly feels horrible to spend a GCD on yet another “damage prep” ability).
I currently rather enjoy the current iteration of MM, and I’ve played MM hunter pretty much on and off since Vanilla. I like the fundamental design, Rapid fire → increases speed of Aimed shot → Aimed shot increases damage of next 1-2 arcane shots, etc. It’s a good flow, but the main issue, ESPECIALLY in PvP, is while Rapid Fire is on CD for a long 20 seconds, it becomes incredibly hard to cast the default-speed, super slow Aimed Shots while rapid fire is on CD. I can’t think of any other class in PvP that has to slow their damage down so dramatically while waiting for a 20 second cooldown. Which, I understand this is a balancing factor and there’s a reason we can’t just spam Rapid Fires. When Aimed Shot refreshes the CD on Rapid Fire (Surging Shots), it feels great, because then you can do that smooth damage cycle again, and it’s fast enough for PVP that you don’t feel like it’s impossible to cast Aimed Shot while 2 melee are dogpiling on you.
Now, someone might say “what’s the difference between this and Double Tap? Sounds like it’s just the same thing, 2 rapid fires back to back”. The main difference is, in terms of PvP burst, Double Tap does 100% more damage in the same exact cast time. It’s taking normal cast length of Rapid Fire and strictly doubling it’s damage - in PvP this is harder to react to than 2 separate rapid fire casts. So, I think it would be more balanced and less “omg what happened to my HP” in PvP. Rapid fire is a 2 second channel baseline (no haste), so this would split the damage across 4 seconds (no haste), much larger window to react to, far less bursty.
Furthermore, doing a Rapid Fire → Tactical Reload → Rapid Fire would also be a net loss if used like this in most cases, because the benefit of each Rapid Fire (30% faster aimed shot) would be wasted if it was used back-to-back, whereas an optimal use would be to do the full damage rotation and then be able to reset it periodically when you simply need that on demand damage and can’t risk casting an ultra slow unbuffed Aimed Shot.
I think this would increase the skill cap in PvP (would be fairly easy to optimize in PvE I’d imagine), would feel less clunky because it’s not just a dead “prep” global, as it would be off GCD, and it would give us more options to get quicker damage while being trained to death in PvP. It would be sorta like Readiness was back in the day, except it only applies to Rapid Fire instead of simply resetting every single CD.
I would thoroughly enjoy this, personally, because I do like our full damage rotation when Rapid Fire is involved, but when Rapid Fire never resets (bad luck) on Aimed Shots, it really drags the pace of our damage down dramatically simply because of bad RNG.
Now, this may turn into a situation where you have too many Rapid Fires and run out of Aimed Shot charges in PvE. In PvP you get CC’d so much and have so many non-damage spells to use, that I rarely run out of Aimed Shot charges in PvP, so this might pose a problem regarding available Aimed Shot charges. Perhaps the talent could also decrease Aimed Shot CD by 10% passively in addition to the activated use? Maybe that’s too much for 1 talent?
Let me know your thoughts and opinions on this, especially PvE’ers because I already know such a change would not be implemented if PvE’ers don’t like it, so I’d like to know what PvE players think about this.
EDIT: Someone in my stream told me that single target PvE builds actually don’t take Hunter’s Knowledge, so would swapping positions of Improved Steady Shot and Lone Wolf be acceptable in PvE? Because this would make Lone Wolf optional for PvP’ers instead of being forced to waste a point to access Hunter’s Knowledge. We’d still require Improved Steady Shot (which isn’t particularly important in Arena since we’re CC’d so much we passively regen plenty focus), however if I’m forced to spend this talent point, at least improved SS is useful, whereas LW generally is not.
Thanks for reading 
EDIT: Somehow I forgot to consider that “Readiness” attached to Wailing Arrow already can reset Rapid Fire and 2 Charges of Aimed Shot. I don’t know how prevalent this is in PvE, I know no one uses it in PvP just because there are far superior choices.
Perhaps a better idea would simply be to make Wailing Arrow a shorter cast (possibly instant but with reduced damage to balance it?) and a shorter cooldown, making it a more reliable reset? Wailing Arrow doesn’t scale with any Aimed Shot modifiers so all it offers is the raw shadow damage, so I feel it could be balanced around a shorter cooldown and faster cast pretty easily, and this would make Readiness/Wailing a much more tempting talent choice. Would this affect PvE particularly? Let me know! I kinda like this idea better (someone in my stream mentioned this and I like it).
