Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
You're right, they shouldn't have done that. It was IMO a rather simplistic, "lazy" way to create design space for additional subclasses to improve salability of future books (at least for clerics; for wizards, I'd say it was a poor extrapolation of the existing magic schools). Using a different metric to define subclasses would have been a better choice in the long run, and they missed an opportunity to correct that (IMO) error in 5.5.In 2e and 3e, though, the specialties weren't enough to be a subclass. They were just a different take on a wizard. 5e should not have turned the specialties into entire subclasses, because doing that does create the expectation that all 8 will be present in the PHB. Specialties in 5e should have had a plusses and minuses like 2e and 3e had, and then a few subclasses dealing with other things.