Heroes of the Storm Forums

We're here today to remember the Specialist. A once compelling and strategically oriented class that was designed to control the flow of the map through superior waveclear, multi-lane pressure, fort sieging, merc capture, and multiple-lane experience soaking. It was a powerful but underappreciated role whose nuances escaped many lower level players (who often just thought the specialist were a collection of assassins that had weird and unique abilities).

I loved the specialist class. I aimed to own all of them first. It was something so unique compared with other mobas. They really spoke to my preference of playstyle to work on a more macro level, using strategy to bring about victory for the team instead of just ramming endless into each other 5vs5 repeatedly over objectives. Other mobas have some options like this but not to the extent that HotS use to.

Gather around younglings, and be regaled with tales of a long lost age where Specialists were designed from the groud up as a class designed to siege and counter siege. Their class description use to reflect that, and it's icon use to be a fortress tower. Each specialist was equipped with at least one ultimate ability that was geared towards pushing, and another that was geared towards teamfight utility and damage. They could be built either way depending on what your team needed most or what strategy you preferred.
Tanks and assassins generally use to have no ability to clear waves quickly. This meant that specialists were needed to effeciently set up pushing waves and respond to the enemy's pushing waves.
Specialists were also usually the only ones who could solo merc easily and early.
They also tended to have tools for damaging forts early from safety.

The Specialist, if played well, could actually win games for their team even if they got less objectives because they would tear down enough of the enemy infrastructure that they offset what the enemy gained from their objective wins. This, of course, also required smart defensive play that allowed you to minimize what the enemy gained from their objectives (like having all the lanes pushed out on cursed hollow before the enemy triggered a curse).

All of this started to change about a year after the beta ended, when a new lead developer took over. It's as though he either didn't understand why the previous devs had designed the game the way they had, or decided to throw it all out the window in pursuit of some new kind of simplified version of the game where only teamfights over objectives mattered. Either way, his rampage against the unsuspecting specialist began in earnest.

First to fall was new warrior and assassins being released with efficient and effective waveclear, allowing them to easily undermine the specialist's patient and persistent efforts to establish wave superiority across the map. This followed with an eventual reworking of all heroes to increase waveclearing ability across the board.

Objective power on maps was steadily increased, making it more difficult to win by smart siege and counter siege play.

As if that assault on the Specialist's identity were not enough, new maps were released entirely without the Specialist in mind that completely undermined their ability to peform their role effectively. The worst offender in this case being towers of doom, which completely removes the ability to deal damage to the enemy's infrastructure while they are occupied elsewhere, and nullifies any real element of lane management.

The descent into death is foreshadowed with the release of Xul. He still has significant pushing elements, but he is clearly geared more towards teamfight utility than previous specialists.

I pointed out these facts on the forum back then, how an entire class's design and purpose was being undermined by the direction they are taking - but it was amazing how many people mistakenly believed that the specialist was just "anything weird that didn't fit in with the other classes". When I pointed to Blizzard's own webpage class description and class icon for the specialist as irrefutable proof that the specialist had a real role of their own to play in the game based around siege mechanics, Blizzard's only response was to erase the Specialist's class description and change their icon.

The hammer blows continue with nerfs to the pushing power of some specialists like Azmodon, reorienting them towards being more teamfighters.

I fix the official date of death for the Specialist as June 14, 2016 because that is the release date of Medivh. He is the first specialist released that doesn't even pretend to have any pushing power. He was merely a support who doesn't heal or shield.

This is an appropriate date of death for the specialist, because, as you can see, they have only managed to release a single specialist in two years. Even though they have release 27 heroes in that time!

Turns out changing the specialist's class description to "a dumping ground for whatever doesn't fit into the other three classes" isn't an effective framework for creative game design and development afterall. You can't expect to be able to design new heroes for a class that has no defined function anymore.

They literally deleted the specialist from the game as a fourth role, and then just tweaked or reworked some of the specialists to be more like assassins or teamfighters.

The release of Medivh marked the point at which I quit HotS and never looked back, taking with me the continual money I was spending on the game with and putting it into League of Legends instead. Even though, prior to the devs destroying my favorite class, I had liked HotS more. This is coming from someone who started playing Mobas back in the very early days of Dota on Warcraft 3, and also played Dota 2.

It's sad. The game has only gone downhill since then. How many more were turned off by the gutting changes they made?
What kills Mobas and MMORPGs is when they alienate the existing players by taking away the things they like about the game. They almost never gain new players with the cahnges they make.
This guy outlined well why that is precisely what killed paragon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz2qUitR90U
In their desperation to be a massive hit they kept retooling the core mechanics of the game, which only drove away the existing players who had the elements they liked ripped away from them and a new game given to them in it's place.
Here is another similar video where someone outlines well what they think will eventually kill league of legends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIi2oJiqO00
People are getting tired of some of the ways they've been changing the game. It's only alienating existing players without drawing new ones in.