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.
Enrage daily quest was a pain since Taunt warrior became very bad... thanks for that...
I just through a deck together with every enrage card and auto filled it. Then went to casual for 2 losses to complete the quest. Was not a fun daily.
Good change, there were so few cards that used the mechanic and most new players didn’t understand enrage meant ‘while damaged’.
Most thought it was a permanent buff or something you could stack multiple times, like Gurubashi Berserker
It is a good thing. HS was always plain and simple and having too many keywords would not help. Look at what MTG become in all those years with nearly infinite number of keywords which are not intuitive at all.
the difference is that you don't get a prompt explaining what the keyword does when you hover over the card in MtG.
The thing is, in mtg, most keywords aren't even in standard. Most players only have to deal with around 10. Also, the hs devs DO want to have many keywords, as it cleans up space and can be easy to understand. The reason they're changing enrage is because they don't plan on printing more cards like it and want to instead focus on effects like rotface and acolyte of pain.
what about enrage daily quests?
Does the Hulk know?😳
I am Enraged!!!!!
But what will the new text be for Spiteful Smith?
I think the first two may be too confusing, even though they most closely match the other enrage card text (as presented with new worgen text). I guess it could go any way to be less confusing for the last three. I think option 3 is probably the most clear and matches up with Rotface pretty well.
Seems a little pointless...
Trimming text in the worgen example above changed it to a compound sentence and added a higher character count (letters and spaces).
They did it because they don't want to print more enrage cards. Having only 9 minions with enrage would make it pointless for new players. If I was blizzard, I would change acolyte of pains ability to enrage (or a similar keyword) along with this change to help newer players, as they are definitely going to print more cards like that.
The only benefit I see coming from this is that searching your collection for damage interactions will be easier. you can simply type damage to bring up all cards that say takes damage, when damaged or whatever it may be
Might as well rename Raging worgen to Damaged worgen
Keyword ‘Mind as well’ has been changed to ‘Might as well’
Injured worgen
Battlecry: deal 3 damage to itself
Warsong commander beckons you home, wolfman
nothig to do with the article, i just wanted to see if you guy are aware of this video with Benjamin Broden:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOyfhco3Upc
Enrage is so confusing for the new players, they can not spend real $$$ is they see confusing words