Emphasis on the key pointThe Boz wrote:The issue is that, unless you for some reason don't want rewards, specialists are mandatory on ~all missions. In fact, with the class and mission design as is right now, I'd be pretty comfortable in stating that a team full of specialists is the most sure-fire approach to any mission, with no strategic downsides.
Letting specialists/shinobis have sole access to one particular thing isn't an issue in-and-of-itself; there are a lot of things that are limited to two or three classes. Want to hit enemies beyond visual range? A sharpshooter or javelin-rocket tech is 'mandatory'. Want reliable AoE enemy-control? A gunner or support-grenadier is 'mandatory'. Want highly-mobile short-range burst damage to kill high-value-targets in an emergency? Bring an assault or sword-spec shinobi. Stealth is limited to shinobis and some sharpshooters, and so on, and so on.
An AWC perk for hacking (call it Script Kiddy and give +25/30 to base hack) would be nice, to allow soldiers to get a random boost to hacking in the same way that they can get random boosts to most of the other class-specialties, and I'd like to see assaults and technicals get in on the skull-jacking thing. Both of those are a long way from a universal buff to base hacking skill, though.
There is one key difference: specialists (and shinobis to a lesser extent) are the only class with an ability to directly affect things on the strategy map with their actions on the tactical maps by recovering supplies/alloys/intel from hack objectives. If you remove the strategy-layer-resource entries from the tables of hack rewards, however, the whole question instantly disappears; none of the tactical-layer rewards are nearly special enough to make a specialist mandatory. They're nice, sure, but why obsess over a one-use Run-and-Gun when I could bring an assault and do it every three turns? Phrasing it that way shines a different light on things: it's not that the problem is 'only specialists can get advanced hack rewards' - that's just a class specialty, and we've got loads of those. The (potential) problem is that advanced hack rewards might be too good, since they are the only class specialty that has persistent effects beyond the current tactical mission.
Whether that's something that needs fixing depends on exactly how significant the extra income actually is. My guess is that the answer is 'it's not that big a deal' - it seems like farming supply raids is a much more significant source of resources, and specialists aren't exactly mandatory for that. The hack rewards are certainly useful, but foregoing them is hardly a game-breaking disadvantage - XWynns' Legendary playthrough on youtube is pretty much 'Missing Out On Hack Rewards: The Movie', and it doesn't seem to be doing him too much harm.