Right, so I've only played HommV and 6 (or MMH6), I eventually got into HOMM5, but MMH6 was....disappointing, even for a filthy casual like me. I felt none of the heroes where really different from each other, same skill sets, almost the same magic selection, and battle felt more based on moving forward and attacking, that brute force mattered more than anything. Even the small things, like all heroes having the same animations was annoying.

So, here are my non-professional fully navel gazing thoughts on what to do for MMH8.

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Heroes:

Okay, so MMH6 introduced heroes of blood and tears to....bugger all effect it felt. So, to take that idea and improve on it. What if heroes started as neither might nor magic, but based on skill selection, became one or the other (irrevocably). How many heroes you could improve this way would either depend on a building, providing an additional benefit to capturing cities, or be set when creating games.

I.E. When playing Haven, your hero starts as a squire. After having a total of 6 skills (at any level of mastery), he has a choice. If he has 3 of might skills, he can become a knight, generally getting better at leading an army, but having little damage capability on his own. If he has 3 magic skills, he could become a cleric, gaining benefits to blessings (see below), if he has 2 might and 2 magic skills, he has the option of becoming a paladin, gaining benefits of both sides, such as blessing troops with magic while also leading them into battle from the front.

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Magic:

Playing MMH6, I realized how much I liked the Four Schools of magic in HOMM5. Not so much in MMH6s where some schools were predominantly either "blood" or "tears" limiting play styles, to solve this why not combine the two. Spells would fall along two axis', one elemental and one "result" or "effect" based. Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Chaos and Order for elemental, and Destruction, Conjuration, Blessings (formerly light) and Curses (formerly dark) for effect. The spell Vampirism would be Dark (elemental) Blessing (effect). Each skill would be improvable from Basic to Expert. Basic Destruction would let you learn fireball (fire), lightning bolt (air), etc. while basic fire magic would let you learn fireball (destruction), firewall (conjuration), and fire shroud (blessing) etc. Having both would add some additional ability (below). This would add some difference between factions, with factions like Haven focusing on blessings and light magic vs the destruction and light magic wood elves use.

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Skills and Abilities

I missed having the skills and abilities from HOMM5, the set of common skills but also race specific ones (like how demons could use luck to gate in twice as many demons in HOMM5). So, I'd bring that back. Have skills play off each other, in the instance above, having basic destruction and basic fire magic would allow for a skill that would improve all basic fire spells even further (akin to Master of Fire), rewarding you for specializing. The abilities beyond those common to all races would be determined not only by faction, but also specialization (might or magic, or both). So, Knights would gain abilities for their martial skills, but none for magic skills, whereas all Haven heroes would have a few abilities unique to their faction spread between both specializations. These could be having morale improve knight creature-specific abilities (jousting for cavalry), improving attack and defense when creatures are close to each other, or the ability to split stacks in tactic mode, allowing your stack of low tier front line troops to be split into three stacks to eat up retaliation, or to create an array of archers, splitting firepower between targets. This would mean all heroes of a faction would play in a similar manner (i.e. all Haven heroes would have a focus on buffing, and morale) but still be distinct to themselves, it would also mean factions would play widely different from each other.

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Foreign cities and vassalage.

When capturing a city of a different race, you'd have two choices, convert it to your race/faction, or make it a vassal. Converting would take a lot of resources, and would take time as well. I did like this idea in MMH6, but I found I spent a LOT of resources converting towns, as did the computer to no ultimate benefit.

Vassalage is the cheaper alternative, being instant and requiring a smaller amount of resources. Vassalage would change one major thing, the creature upgrades. Instead of the usual upgrades for tier 1 - 7 creatures, they would get altered upgrades based on who the town owes allegiance to. A Haven town subjected to vassalage by necromancers, would produce darker versions or similar of it's usual upgrades, while also producing the usual non-upgraded units. Rather than upgrade to paladins, cavaliers would upgrade to death knights gaining vampiric abilities, priests to necrachs who could curse and bless. The downside to vassal creatures would be that they would count for SOME racial abilities, but not all (as well as being additional types of creatures and not directly addable to stacks), so in the above examples, such creatures could be raised permanently through the Raise Dead spell or similar, but they wouldn't automatically resurrect with an ability like Eternal Servitude, and if you where to hire a knight hero, they would count for some of the haven specific abilities, but would be immune to morale benefits such heroes usually rely on. A vassal town would also have some other drawback, such as lower income, limited improvements etc, while also being cheaper for an enemy army of the "base" race of the city to convert (i.e. a vassaled Haven city would be cheaper for a Haven faction to convert than one that had been converted entirely).