The Enrage Keyword is Being Removed From Hearthstone
But don't worry, the effect is staying! The goal is to clean up card text since the keyword wasn't being used much. As of today, there are nine collectible cards in the game with Enrage. Peter Whalen explains below.
Update: Mike Donais has confirmed the Enrage quest (Play 10 Minions with Enrage) is being removed too. (Source)
Quote from Peter WhalenFirst things first: we’re removing the Enrage keyword from Hearthstone. All the Enrage cards will keep their effects; we’re just rewording them without the keyword. For example, Angry Chicken will read “Has +5 Attack while damaged.”
Our goal with this change is to clean up the game a little by removing a keyword we weren’t using much, but we also wanted to take the opportunity to share some of our general philosophy on keywords.
Keywords in Hearthstone are the bolded words in the card text – they’re words that have a special meaning in the context of the game. We use them a lot; most of our sets have introduced at least one keyword and the Basic and Classic sets have a bunch. Why are keywords helpful?
- Keywords can make learning cards easier. Once you know a keyword, it can boil down a complex idea and help you understand a new card more quickly.
- Keywords are flavorful. They tell a story – Discover, Recruit, Taunt; these all help the game come alive.
- Keywords condense card text. This leads to more readable cards that fit better in the frame.
- Keywords give us mechanical hooks. So we can make cards like “Give your Taunt minions +2/+2.”
So why not make lots and lots of keywords? In the extreme, we could keyword everything – the “Kel’Thuzading” keyword would mean “At the end of each turn, summon all friendly minions that died this turn” and the Doomsaying keyword would mean “At the start of your turn, destroy ALL minions.” That feels a bit silly – because it is! Keywords aren’t all upside, so it’s worth taking a look at which keywords are worth keeping.
Ultimately, we have keywords to make cards easier to understand. The best keywords appear a lot, are flavorful, and give us useful mechanical hooks. In the last year, we added two examples that we expect to be permanent: Poisonous and Lifesteal. These are great abilities that make minions a bit more interesting – they alter combat math, change which minions you prioritize, and spice up gameplay. The full text for both of these abilities is also fairly long – without a keyword, it’d be hard to pair them with much else.
So let’s take a look at Enrage. Enrage means “While damaged, this minion has a new power.” It’s on nine cards: six from the Basic and Classic sets, two from Whispers of the Old Gods, and one from Goblins vs. Gnomes. Part of the reason we haven’t used it much is that it’s a difficult keyword to design for: minions in Hearthstone don’t survive very long, especially once they’ve been damaged. Instead, we’ve favored cards with triggered abilities that encourage you to damage them multiple times, like Acolyte of Pain and Rotface. These lead to more interesting gameplay as you try to maximize the number of times they get damaged.
How well, then, is Enrage serving us as a keyword? First, it’s not clear that Enrage is actually any easier to understand than “while damaged”. It is certainly flavorful though, and does shrink the card text a little. On the other hand, we haven’t made any cards that key off of Enrage minions and aren’t likely to in the future. Overall, Enrage isn’t doing very much work for us, we haven’t used it in a while, and it isn’t on very many cards, so we’re cleaning up the game a little bit and removing it.
I want my full refund. I crafted grommash simply because I like the word enrage. Now enrage is no longer on the card. I don't want the card anymore.
When this post came out, I was mostly "meh". Figured they had no intention of bringing more enrage cards to the game, making it a pointless keyword.
And then Redband Wasp was announced. I mean, WTF.
I hope this is just a silly April Fools joke, cause it's a rather pointless change.
Unless it's a coding issue, I don't see the value in removing a keyword that isn't problematic. Enrage = when this minion has taken at least one damage but isn't dead, then X.
The value of a keyword is for making it searchable, and just saving text space on the card. I don't know that Enrage was ever a problem in terms of new players getting it. Could still call it El Enragerino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing, man...
This was the game change everyone was everyone was clamoring for!
I am outraged
Outenraged?
It may be that they want certain keywords to be specific to a set. Keywords like inspire and adapt were set identifiers while discover and poisonous are used universally.
If they don't plan to use echo here and there in future sets it would be weird to have 1 card outside the set with the keyword.
It could have been such an interesting mechanic if they just could have use a bit more immagination. Another demostration of how boring the card design of HS is becoming.
I think this change is very good for 3 reasons
1. It removes an annoying quest
2. because it is just another keyword for new players to learn and having it say "when this is damaged" is very self explanitory and is a lot simpler.
3. you might think it will mess up your search field, but I wont because when you are making an enrage warrior, sorry, when this is damaged warrior, you will want cards with enrage, and cards with "whenever a minion takes damage" effects. So now you can just search for "damage" and get the enrage effects, when a minion takes damage effects, and all whirlwind effects.
i suppose it can help the abysmal new player experience, not fix it but help it. Think of it like bringing towels to a town hit by a tsunami
dungeon run = best new player experience of any card game i've ever tried
My last one I saw "Play 10 Minions with Enrage" Quest.
https://imgur.com/a/RWBuA
Edit: Fixed image link.
Hope they don't forget to change the angry chicken to the first set of option when creating zombeast... (since angry chicken have some text effect instead of keyword)
Oh okay. I never play rexxar in wild so I'm not sure which category angry chicken is in. Thanks for the info
Who wants to riot w/ me and make complaint threads about this?
"Slightly annoyed when damaged chicken"