Generic Talent

Although most Heroes have Talents geared specifically towards their kit and playstyle, there are multiple Talents that are similar to Talents on other Teroes, or even outright shared between them. These are called Generic Talents, and although the amount of these Talents have gone down over the years, there are still quite a few left, and some that are similar to those Talents of old. There are some Talents that used to be present on many Teroes but were either phased out by unique, special versions, or were flat-out removed on all Heroes that had it.

Blizzard on Generic Talents
"When we were first putting the talent system into Heroes of the Storm, back in the first BlizzCon when it was playable, we really settled on the talent system kind of late in the the game developing process and we decided, "Wow, we need to make a lot of talents for a lot of these hero kits that were already fully-fleshed out." So we created a lot of "generic talents" that would be applicable to multiple Heroes and they worked great at the time but as we continue to develop more and more heroes we found that we would have, not only greater control over the balance of the hero, but also we could create more interesting, very unique and kind of fun interactive things that inherently kind of felt like you were playing Kerrigan as opposed to just having a "poison dot." It wasn't particularly thematic for the character.

Over time, as we've gone into reworks if we think it makes sense we don't have to always remove (an older talent) if it's working well. We still have Block on a number of characters and that's fine because we think it serves its purpose. For Kerrigan be basically thought we had better replacements or more interesting replacements to really reinforce the play style of the character to begin with. We thought we could create more interesting talents so we don't have anything inherently against these talents in particular but we always thought we have better ideas as we've gone through reworks through the years."

Trivia

 * Dehaka is the last Hero to receive an unmodified Generic Talent (Hardened Shield) upon release.