Hero specialty
Hero specialty is a beneficial trait of an hero. Specialties can be categorized into four types: spells, creatures, secondary skills and productions. The first three mentioned all improve the usage of the specified trait, the production specialty generates resources for the kingdom. Most of the specialties are unique, like Orrins archery or Solmyrs chain lightning. However, there are several specialties shared by few heroes, like offence for Crag Hack and Gundula or armourer for Neela, Mephala and Tazar.
Armageddon's Blade and Shadow of Death expansions introduced Adrienne, Darco, Gelu and Sir Mullich, who have exceptional specialties. Adrienne's specialty is fire magic, which is a secondary skill, but it does not give her any other befits than the fact that she starts with expert fire magic. Draco has enchanters and Gelu has sharpshooters as specialty. The exception for both of them is, that Draco can "upgrade" mages/arch mages and monks/zealots to enchanters, and respectively Gelu can upgrade archers/marksmen and elves/grand elves to sharpshooters. Sir Mullichs has speed as specialty, which increases combat speed for creatures under his command by +2.
Calculation
Specialties of Sorcery, Logistics, Offense, and the like have similar effects. They all increase the skill by a 5% per level. To calculate for this type of specialty, you must get 5% of the secondary skill's effect and multiply it to the hero's level, then add to the skill's effect.
Formula = (.05*Secondary skill's effect percentage*Hero level+Secondary skill's effect percentage)
Example: Level 20 Crag Hack with Expert Offense.
.05*30*20+30 = 60, thus Crag Hack's army will deal 60% more damage. That means that he has gained a 30% increase to his Offense skill. It also means that he gained 30% more offense than any other character, aside from Gundula would have.
Creature specialties
Spell specialties
Bless
Bless is the specialty of Adela. It causes bless to be cast with increased effect, based on hero level compared to the level of the target unit (the bonus is greater when used on weaker units). Adela's bless specialty increases the damage of a unit using the following equation:
- base damage * 0.03 * hero level / unit level
This extra damage is in addition to the bless spell. For example, at level 18 Adela will provide a 54% damage bonus to halberdiers, 27% to marksmen, 18% to royal griffins, 13.5% to crusaders, 10.8% to zealots, 9% to champions, and 7.1% to archangels.