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.
No, i simply do not agree with them. Their explaination is really, really bad.
Ah, then maybe you should have said that instead of "lol, why?" as if you didn't understand or read their argument.
Makes sense, there aren't really a lot of cards with the effect, but I like keywords.. they make texts more smooth, and easier to find synergies while building decks.
But, too many keywords might be really confusing, I played only a bit of TES and there is a keyword for almost anything it is quite confusing and didn't like it, in the end I didn't stick with the game. I can see why they opted to remove useless keywords.
I think they should use the same keywords for same effects and have "can't be targeted by spells or hero powers" as a keyword..
That will affect discover pool for Deathstalker Rexxar, since you will not find the Angry Chicken in the second choice...
Why? It's still a beast and it will still cost the same amount of mana, why does enrage change that?
Angry Chicken was always in the 1st choice. Enrage in itself isn't enough like battlecry or deathrattle, it needs supplementary text.
Grommash Hellscream
I can rage no longer ...
Makes sense. I just hope they don't forget to remove the Enrage Quest or else we'll be stuck with an uncompleteable quest
Good, we need more Quality of Life changes like this.
There goes my Enrage Mage deck I use to complete the quest.
Fair enough
Erm?
Considering that cards with this keyword were mostly used in Warrior, hopefully there will be a good replacement for it in the future.
It's even worse in the Russian translation. Just take a look at this:
While in the English version it's reatively the same amount of text, it got appalling in the Russian localization.
Clumsy card-text translations is one of the reasons why I play the English localization, even being Russian.
The voice-overs are even clumsier and more ridiculous though... Probably, it's just a matter of habit.
As a Russian speaker, I'm confused what the guy translating these is smoking. You could say the same thing with less text and without trying to be fancy: '+1 к атаке и "Неистовство ветра" если это существо повреждено.'
Moreover, I would have translated "Windfury" keyword as "Сила ветра" instead of "Неистовство ветра". It's like they're going out of their way to make the text longer. What they did is equivalent to English version saying 'Has +1 Attack and "Power of the furious wind" if this creature has health that isn't completely full .'
Maybe y'all can hack in after the update to its simpler format
OK. We understood what you did today during your lunch. Will everything which you discuss during it will be implemented in the game? I am sure that the guy who suggested this just wanted to make a joke.
I think that wording: "Whenever you cast a spell" is much more confusing. And various other ordering mechanics, but we keep them for good.
All this, while "CAn't be targeted by spells and hero powers and a bit of more usless text here to make this unnecceseraly long than it should be" still dosen't have a f*cking keyword. Makes sence. I guess the current version tellls a story for sure. Literally.