Well, specials don’t do less and less, but Legendary troops boost HP much more than any other stat. So specials do give or less the same damage but heroes with Legendary troops can take more damage. I think this is SGG’s attempt to slow down meta, and in classic SGG way it is locked behind a paywall (though you can convert troops but that is resource-intensive and takes time).
About whether this would skew meta towards mono: I don’t see a reason for this. On the contrary I think it’s better to have rainbow team of troops, like heroes. Don’t see much mono on defense either around 3k trophies where I am currently hovering.
On raids I do rainbow exclusively and with same team. No strategic reason for that, just laziness.
In war I am running either 2-2-1 or 3-1-1, but not mono. Because when I use mono, then I am almost sure not having tiles. Rainbow troops are mostly for prioritizing defense, where I have rainbow team and so does our alliance.
I have been challenged by mono many times but ironically a majority of them fail, it’s often blue mono as well because I field twin gestalts on a W formation. The teams that consistently win against me are the rainbows or semi mono
One war before, we were matched against a former top50 alliance (they are not full, it was a 25 vs. 25 war). They have a former alliance mate on their team and we created a common war room to exchange videos of our attacks. I was surprised that they did a very higgh number of mono attacks. One player of them failed and rage quit after the war, but a high number of mono attacks worked for them, and at the end they won with 1000 points!
We got an average of 3-4 oneshots on their defenses, they managed to get 4-5 on ours.
If the mono teams are strong, key heroes protected by 5* troops, they can outsuffer most defenses. Its definitely not the tile damage, but the coordinated specials of several heroes that is decisive in todays meta. Maybe fast mono teams are the new atk meta.
Maybe Mono becomes the meta for people that don´t have meta heroes lol.
At the actual top level of the game people don´t need to resort to gambling in order to kill things, that´s just for people that don´t have 30+ shiny new and LB2 heroes.