Wolves kind of take it to another level which results in more impressive feats than AWDs and Dholes, which I think aren't ACTUALLY more impressive. Where AWDs and Dholes will, like you say, take time to exhaust and weaken a prey animal, that time might be say an hour or two. Wolves might take 6 months. They have a different level of strategising and fore-planning where they monitor and manage a territory of prey animals that they almost treat like "livestock" which they "harvest" at the appropriate time (and indeed, I believe wolves, as dogs, taught us about the concept of livestock).
I always thought this was an amazing video. In it a wolf "kills" a bull bison ... without even touching it.
It just knew it was gonna die at that time. And very interestingly, the bison knew that it knew, so it strategically moved away from the herd, with a fit bull "body guard" companion, to try and outsmart the alpha wolf that it knew was gonna come for it at it's final moments. The wolf comes for it, and finds it's herd but the bull is no where to be seen. The wolf is momentarily confused, and then visibly is like "Oh I fuckin know where it will be" and just runs off in a very specific direction in a straight line. It then finds the bull, and just lays down and waits. Within hours the bull dies of natural causes and it feasts. It knew that was coming at that time from months of analysis and monitoring, where it checked it's urine and feces and it's saliva on foliage it ate and the skin cells it left behind where it slept, and it knew it was due to die. It probably also worked on weakening the bison intermittently with increasing intensity towards the final few months. In this way a wolf rarely "fails" a hunt. It can look like it fails when it stops and moseys off. But it's not finished. Its all planned out and strategised.
AWDS and dholes are a little different, they are more just opportunistic, go find what they can and then select a target and run it and harass it to death. It may often be an animal they never met before who just was passing through their territory. Wolves know every animal in their territory and also prevent them from leaving, they make an invisible fence around their territory and often push prey herds back into the middle of their territory when they start drifting close to the edge. This is where "herding" in dogs comes from, it's a natural wolf behaviour. Wolves spend a lot of time messing around with their "livestock" with no intention whatsoever of killing it.
AWDs have much longer "chases" than wolves typically do, but wolves cover much much much much more ground per day, because wolves are actually working as ranchers or graziers. Going from herd to herd and moving them around and analysing them and assessing them and occasionally targeting individuals for some weakening and etc etc. AWDs might chase an animal and attack it over 13 miles before killing it. But wolves travel 30 miles per day, every day, working. One individual chase on one animal won't be as long as an AWDs, but that's only a small part of what they do.
Using their strategies you will sometimes see wolves pull off incredible feats, like single headedly killing a bison, but if you knew the backstory of preparation it's at once both more impressive and kind of less impressive in that the bison was already on death's door and the wolf knew that and orchestrated that into being.
Of course every predator might incidentally luck out and find some pitifully helpless prey animal. I think this is the reason we sometimes have some remarkable cases like lynx killing wild boar. It could have been a wild boar wolves have been weakening and working on for 6 months and it was about ready for harvest anyway and on death's door before the lynx found itself at the right place at the right time. But wolves are defined as animals that strategically manipulate things into their favour in this way, so they kind of consistently kill very large prey animals relative to their size. Note that wolves kill far far more impressive prey much more regularly than leopards and mountain lions, but there's the caveat of them first strategically weakening that prey over a long period.
Mind you there is ofcourse also the caveat for leopards and mountain lions ambushing disadvantaged unaware prey, and also no doubt favouring vulnerable weaker specimens with a preference as well.
All predators "cheat" as much as they possibly can and that should always be remembered, but wolves are very brilliantly strategic about it. This is how they manage to consistently "defy" the limitations that should be set by their gracile bones. Bone robusicity tends to correlate with capacity for tackling large prey and wolves greatly over-achieve relative to their limb robusticity, and it's thanks to using the strategies I have outlined above. They can be both marathon runners that cover insanely long distances and also hunters of big game. These two things wouldn't normally be compatible, the demands for lightness to run marathons would diminish their capacity for having the strength to tackle big game, but they have masterfully found a work-around.
