For dungeons and raiding there are a few factors that make certain classes inordinately valuable for a successful group. m+ Dungeons are especially bad about this as less people means that each individual’s utility is more important, and also different content pushes different utility.
An example of dungeon utility vs raid utility can be seen with warlocks: most pug raids want a warlock just for the convenience of not having to run to the stone to summon, but also beyond that you have encounters where lock gates are invaluable like jadefire’s gauntlet which can be done without lock gates, but is trivialized by having a lock who didn’t die in the first half of the fight, Ghuun was another big one for this. Also warlocks have them cookies those cookies are amazing. Despite all this useful raid utility which also includes battle rezes warlocks in general are one of the lower represented classes in mythic plus for bfa because they changed alot of the things that made warlock dps in legion great for m+.
I could write an essay here on class utility in dungeons vs raids, but i’ll pass on that and say classes in general weren’t created equal in terms of utility, BUT everything is viable even feral druids. Group composition is a thing though.
Beyond individual utility I think one of the most important things to watch is ranged vs melee. Despite there being more melee specializations compared to range raids tend to encourage stacking ranged dps, and this is mostly due to fight design. In contrast mythic plus encourages having 1-2 melee in a group, triple melee can get nasty on some affixes, but in general the good melee classes really shine in m+ compared to bfa raids.
Yes hunters > all if not raiding or pvp or doing competitive dungeons. If your goal is doing world quests and collecting battle pets hunters > all. Unless you have a druid who can fly in and scoop up stuff w/o losing travel form. Other then that hunters > all, unless you need to rez or heal people that is. Other then all those hunters > all.
It also depends on perception / preconceived notions.
For example, right now, feral druids while not amazing or overpowerered are in a decent to average position. And are perfectly ok for standard content.
However at the beginning of BfA, feral were abysmal. No matter how good you were at the class, the class itself was broken in a bad bad way.
That stigma stuck… and still remains. So people automatically think feral = bad / useless etc.
Same with other specs and classes. Now when it comes to dungeons / raids… people want the classes / specs that will help them get the dungeon done faster or more efficiently. Doesn’t matter how good said player is, if class A has amazing aoe and support skills but the player is mediocre, and you have amazing single target class B with few support skills but the player is great…
They will take class A every time because aoe >>all in most cases along with the support skills.
If you’re never going to consider raiding or M+, nothing matters. At all. The early/mid endgame has never been so faceroll to start with and so easy to rapidly outgear.
Beyond that classes matter, but until you get to very high end content it’s surmountable. The problem is that even though everything’s usable enough for the scale of content most people will bother to do, it often feels like fighting uphill compared to ones that are measurably superior. Like, yes, you can do a Grievous +10 with bear tank, rsham, and three ranged, but you’ll probably hate yourself and everything else by the end of it. And then you can run a +15 with a more standard comp and wonder if you’re still looking at the same affixes.
By the time you hit Mythic raid, those composition requirements become much stricter – sometimes surmountable, but it feels awful trying. Where lock gates and DHs were a cool convenience in Normal/Heroic Jadefire, it’s effectively balanced around it in Mythic. Grong requires a bunch of melee for chain interrupts. Opulence is nearly impossible without a mass grip. On Conclave you’re just boned without at least 5-6 decurses, and even then it feels terrible without a couple more. If you do Rasta with a bunch of resto druids, you probably won’t get past the Grievous Axes in the first phase. And so on.
This has more to do with the ridiculous variability in difficulty between weeks. Just about anyone with a pulse, the desire to do it, and a tank who knows Reaping routes could’ve easily done so in Tyrannical/Raging/Volcanic. A +15 that week in many ways felt like a +7 in some of the nastier ones.