Agreed. Hunters in general need changes. Raptor’s Fury didn’t change the game play at all besides now prioritizing Raptor Strike even more over Flanking Strike. The latter is just there as filler.
Mongoose Bite keeps getting buffed through runes but still deals fixed damage before armor. Why not give it AP/weapon scaling and have it consume all stacks of Raptor’s Fury or Flanking Strike for a big hit or something? Let alone allowing it to be used without having to dodge. All the power of the melee runes is concentrated on a single ability: RS.
It’s all just a mess. I have written before about hunter stuff here, should you be interested.
I’m not too hopeful though. At least they gave us more pets and even a new family (somehow wyverns didn’t get the same treatment) but it still feels half-made due to the new family having no Dash/Dive and no viability besides novelty. Of course, no more stable slots in sight despite the community asking the devs over and over. They’ve never even talked about whether it’s hard or easy to do.
Focus Fire is a tiny step in the right direction because we need way more active interaction with the pets and a way of having BM ranged do more than just AFK auto-shotting and multi-shotting once every 10 seconds. However, I’d rather have something better than taking stacks from a pet to buff us such as making Kill Command a 6s cooldown attack.
Plus as you say so many families are excluded but they were gonna be anyway. Like, the best pet to use Focus Fire with are cats/raptors and then owls/bats (but they’re worse unless you somehow need Screech). Wind Serpents won’t be as good due to LB’s 50 focus cost. That is fine though because they can just be used by melee hunters, which is great for variety but in the end we keep using the three same eternal families. No changes from vanilla.