The two encrypted relics that aren’t chosen despawn your swarms with them, rather than them bouncing back. This is not exclusive to Encrypted, but also other mobs that despawn e.g. the ghosts on the 3rd boss in Halls of Atonement (though really, just fixing the relics is mainly what matters).
This is not only a massive nerf to the ability, but also a huge QOL issue - its very frustrating losing your colony to this. Especially as a Feral Druid where the covenant is so close to being viable in M+ (well, viable in comparison to other Feral builds at least) but held back by a few things - such as this.
When I play Resto, sometimes I Flourish just to extend Swarms and prevent losing them to this. But this not only wastes a CD to mitigate a bug, but also Feral doesn’t have the luxury of this.
I can’t really stress enough how significant this is on gameplay. Losing big swarm stacks every boss and every trash pack with relics is absolutely enormous.
If this is not able to be fixed, it would be awesome to see the split rate increased quite a bit (rebuild easier / bigger colony) to accommodate not only for this issue , but many other scenarios where you can lose significant portions (or the entirety of) your colony that you worked so hard to build. Other issues like LOS to stairs or around corners. That and the fact wiping means having to restart your colony from scratch - this would mitigate such pains.
The ability and gameplay is so unique now with the legendary, please fix its interaction with the seasonal affix.
I have made a short video illustrating the issue:
