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 mean, they just removed Enrage for having only 9 cards with the effect. The Elusive effect also only has 9 cards with it. This is really just another nail in that coffin, as much as I want the keyword myself.
It's important to differentiate keywords that are/will become more common as more cards are released for Hearthstone. I too think that "Can't be Targeted by Spells or Hero Powers" has the potential to be summarised by a keyword. My understanding of the situation is that if it's not something we can expect to see a lot of in the future, the description seems fitting enough as it is.
Removing Enrage as a keyword is a bit of a backwards move IMO, as it is already a decently established keyword that sees rather limited play.
All in all, "Has X while damaged" isn't that bad of a change; It's short and to the point without the use of one word to lock it down. It can still be printed on cards in the future, but I might take a while getting used to it.
No more enrage?!
Outrage: Becomes Offended
"Oh shit there's this keyword called enrage and we haven't made any cards that use it since forever. What should we do?"
Option 1: "Let's make more cards that support it!"
Option 2: "Let's erase it from the game."
Hmmm
Seems like a reasonable change. Although it makes me ask the question: if they favour cards like Acolyte of Pain and Rotface for damage-triggered effects, should those effects gain a keyword? (i.e. Stress: Do something whenever this minion takes damage. So Acolyte of Pain would become "Stress: Draw a Card.")
This doesn't quite work, since some cards (12 of them, Acolyte of Pain included) say "Whenever this minion takes damage...", while others (3 of them, Rotface included) say "After this minion survives damage...".
These are definitely different effects, and it seems weird to keyword one - which only has 3 more cards than Enrage did - and leave the other alone when it is so close to being the same.
I bet my donkey they'll probably do this in the expansion after the next one
I like your idea .
That is a good point. I guess if they chose to keyword the effect they'd have to either 1) Change the cards that say "survive" to be consistent with the cards that say "take" or 2) Have a qualifier within the keyword to distinguish the two (i.e. Stress: and Stress(Survive):). However both of those have their own consequences, and as you mention given that the pool of card with this effect is currently rather small, this is likely an issue for a few years/expansions down the road.
angry chicken is more angry now
Angry Chicken transformed into Sad Chicken =(
is it just me or is your name upside down XD
It sounds weird at first, but I do remember talking recently about just how few Enrage minions there are in the game - there's more Poisonous (16), Lifesteal (17), and even an equal amount of the un-keyworded Elusive (9).
Makes sense that they'd make so few cards with such an aggressive keyword, and that they're removing it since they use it so infrequently.
But what's the logic behind this? They remove a keyword, just because they haven't used it that often? The explanation sounds really stupid to me - why not keep the cards they were before? What was so bad with the old keyword? The card description was short and simple already. I mean, it's true, that the new text doesn't change much (instead of a single word now we have 2 additional ones), but the devs could have spared themselves a bit of work. No one was complaining about the existence of this rarely used keyword.
But for me adding more keywords doesn't make the cards more complicated, instead they make them cleaner and visually better. And it's not like enrage was implemented a week or a month ago and the devs decided that it's not worth to make a keyword out of it. It has always been there, so why change it now? How would this improve the play-experience significantly for the players? I mean, you have to agree, that the devs could have concentrated on far more important things than a plain keyword used on 8 different cards.
If someone can't get past the tutorial, then they are way too little to play this game anyway. I mean, it's not like you have to know these keywords by heart, you can always move the cursor over the card and read the text. Yu-Gi-Oh cards are way more complicated and have walls of text, and yet the designers continue to support this trend. HS will never have this problem in comparison to that TCG. I think, that the devs just assigned themselves unnecessary work. If they really wanted to improve the wording on some cards, then they should have changed the text on some druid spells, which give you empty mana crystals, but don't say anything about Excess Mana.
[edit]
Yeah, I also got the same impression from the aforementioned change.
Damm thats some sad news, I liked the enrage keyword...