“Pull the Ripcord” was a term used by Ion in the Preach interview where he was pressed about “What if covenant abilities are too strong on certain specs and people are required to flip flop based on spec changes, or doing certain content you would very much want a different covenant ability.” Ion replied that they had a plan if it came to that to “Pull the ripcord” which was largely implied to make swapping covenants a less damaging thing to the player. People speculate this to be the removal of the penalty, or just making the covenants like a talent you can change at will with no downside.
As such, people are already noticing the criteria being met, and it was met on the second of the announcement with a covenant giving you two abilities, each being very dominant in certain bits of content. Even worse, most classes have abilities that are huge for single target (raiding) on one covenant, then if they want to do PvP it’s a different one, and if they want m+ it’s a third one. So they were saying to put the change in from the start. The demands have only gotten worse as the covenant balancing is getting worse due to power creep and certain demands from fights indirectly dictating covenant selection.
A lot of people are also assuming there was no ripcord in place and that Ion said it hoping people would just accept the system as “Blizzard will fix it eventually.” Yet they are hesitant to and it’s looking like in 9.3 they might just make the covenants all friends and allow you to accept their blessings for combat at the drop of a hat if they’re going to do anything.
In summary, in typical Blizzard fashion. Release a terrible system, lock power behind it, make it unbearingly annoying to deal with. Have absolutely no fallbacks to mitigate it. Save the day in the final patch when it pretty much no longer matters. Be confused why players aren’t happy that you fixed the problem and act like punctuality on these needed changes shouldn’t matter.
Only took them until 7.3.5 to fix Legiondaries with the solution people were telling them FROM ALPHA TESTING and that anybody could see would be necessary a mile away. Instead it comes when most people have their legendary they needed and if your first 2 legendaries were Prydaz and some garbage legendary you were screwed. Namely on rogues where it was imperative you had Mantle of the Master Assassin and if you’re like me, it was your second to last legendary.
