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.
The purpose of the Counter keyword is probably to condense the card text. "Negate its effects" might work to replace it though.
This is just Outrageous!!!! Not only does this change Enrage me to no end but Blizzard will roll out another 1G patch to add this change to the game.
Seems fine. If only they could add a keyword to replace the whole "Can't be targeted by spells or hero powers" blob of text.
It "cleans up card text"...while showing an example with more actual text.
If you're trying to clean things up, you should consider adding "recruit" to the half-dozen minions that do identical things. Since there's no built-in recruit synergy, there's no reason not to do it.
How will this affect beast choices from effects such as the Death Knight Deathstalker Rexxar?
I guess it's a nerf. Angry Chicken is a good choice in lots of cases.
Does Angry Chicken get removed from the selection of the hero power, then?
Also, don't understand why your reply was downvoted.
And this is more pressing than fixing longstanding ambiguities in the text on druid cards or adding the "recruit" keyword to relevant minions because?
Makes sense. The other day I had the enrage quest, so I pulled out my deck with Blood Razor, Rotface etc. After I finished the first game, I noticed I had no progress on my quest. In a closer inspection, it turned out that while the entire deck is based on self-damage, it had 0 enrage cards in it...
I think this is good, in one on my first games I thought that enrage minions will gain +x attack every time they were damaged like gurubashi bersek I soon find out that is wasnt like that
A bunch of people are getting angry without reading like always, so dont enrage your self
Stupid pointless and waste of developer resources.
Inb4 the new keyword in raven xpac #2 is enrage Kappa
I never got why they don't make more enrage cards. Instead of simply +attack, they could give them different effects like draw a card or deal damage to all enemy minions. This way you could still see them being played in warriors or mages.
The trouble is, Enrage doesn't work like this. Enrage isn't a triggered effect that does something (e.g. draw a card) whenever a minion is damaged, or the first time a minion is damaged. It's a kind of ongoing effect, providing some bonus for as long as the minion is damaged.
This is why the Enrage effect goes away if the minion is healed back to full health. This is also why (for example) Gurubashi Berserker isn't an Enrage effect. The effect is actually quite similar to Cogmaster or Southsea Deckhand - these are also conditional ongoing effects, rather than triggered effects.
So for example, you can make a minion with "Enrage: +3 Attack", or even something weirder like "Enrage: Taunt" or "Enrage: This minion can't be targeted by spells or hero powers", but you can't put a one-time effect like "draw a card" or "deal 1 damage to all enemy minions" after Enrage.
This is a very common misconception about Enrage - and it might have been another reason why Blizzard chose to remove it as a keyword.
Thank you Blizzard for making a big deal out of not changing my game play in any manor. Carry on.
Guys it's actually a buff for Deathstalker Rexxar we are more likely to get life steal or poisonous or echo as keyworded beasts instead of.. enrage which is mostly MEH as a zombeast, but enrage works well with taunt.