It's somewhat changed with Taken King, but historically Hunters have always been less about their supers than the other two classes. Warlocks and Titans always have a buildup to a big spike of damage output, and then they're back to normal. Hunters always had roaming supers that can't exactly guarantee kills and need setup to do well with, and even Shadowshot doesn't explicitly do much other than augmenting your normal performance. Because of that, Hunters generally have had a better arsenal when not supered than the other two. Their throwing knives, blink strike and smoke give them higher range potential entering a melee fight. Invisibility has its uses in the right hands with how radar-reliant people are, and Nightstalker's enhanced radar is incredibly useful. Their grenades aren't exactly bad. Their jump is perhaps the best in the game for Crucible because while Titans do have lift skating, only Hunters can instantaneously overwrite their current momentum when they hit the jump button a second time and then they're affected by gravity so there's no true hang time where they're vulnerable. They can even shoot while multi-jumping. So yeah. It's mainly in the kit.