I mean… I dont get it, why are we talking about skydiving or is this another one of those situations where someone found a random word and applied a new completely irrelevant meaning to it in order to try and turn it into a meme or a hashtag?
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Very nice. I wasn’t even planning on picking a covenant at all. This will make life much easier.
It is the typical human reaction to change of any kind. The vast majority of the people in this thread have zero personal experience with covenants yet have their minds firmly made up based on streamers and the like.
It’s sad. Don’t try anything new! It’s scary!! What a bunch of sheep.
Ion, in his interview with preach said that in the end if the covenants don’t end up working and that their abilities needed to be swappable that there was a failsafe of sorts in place to do so. That they could, in Ions own words, “pull the ripcord”
The hashtag was not invented out of the blue by clever forum goers or YouTubers or any of that nonsense, it’s something that Ion himself stated in the preach interview that became the keyword/hashtag.
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A bit of a long story, but essentially during an interview after last years Blizzcon? (I think) and the announcement of Shadowlands.
Ion (WoW Game director) referred to the Covenant system (A new borrowed power system we are getting in Shadowlands) having a ripcord.
A ripcord, is what you call the string you pull to deploy a parachute. If you don’t pull it, you go splat. He referred the system having a ripcord, if the original iteration of the system didn’t work and they could pull it, if need be. He later stated there is no ripcord, which IMHO I don’t believe, and I think they are just being stubborn. 
A good portion of the Alpha / Beta testers have been saying since day 1, this won’t work. Reason being each of the 12 Classes gets the option of 4 abilities, all unique and 1 tied to the 4 different covenants, you have to choose from. They were initially completely locked and a permanent choice, no takies backies.
Eventually Blizzard caved and gave the option to switch Covenants, if needed with some time-gating added on.
#PullTheRipcord is basically the idea of making the covenant abilities swappable like talents. (Along with some other changes to the other systems which I won’t get into.) Which would make them easier to balance and allow freedom of choice for the Covenants based on cosmetics and still have the opportunity to take your “best” ability. If you wanted.
We have been in the balancing phase of the Shadowlands beta for just over a month now and recently they’ve nerfed all 48 covenant abilities. Instead of just pulling the ripcord and keeping all the abilities at their unique interesting strengths. They have made majority of them rather dull and barely worth mentioning. This could be for later changes or they have just given up on trying to balance the system. That players have been saying was bad, since Day 1.
Side note, this happened to Blizzard in the previous two expansions and took multiple patches to fix it. Apparently two times wasn’t enough, Blizzard is going for three.
What it means to a new player? Probably not much, at least right now.
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Thank you for the detailed explanation! I haven’t hit 50 yet but I hear I’m about to get bombarded with new systems once I do. Interesting that many more are coming with Shadowlands in a few weeks in addition to those at 50.
I really enjoy the Talent trees. The part that I like about it the most is being able to travel into town and just swap them around to match the encounter I want to tackle or just to try new things.
Same with switching specs at will, I absolutely LOVE having that freedom and keeps the game interesting IMO having that versatility per class.
I say this because I come from ESO where any class can wear any type of armor and fulfill any type of role within the trinity as well as share in many different skill types less class-specific. So coming to WoW it did feel a bit more restrictive (I want to wear a plate chest/shoulders and be a battle mage!!)
I personally don’t see much value in just adding basically cosmetic skills. They should have made these covenant skills swappable or just put them in the talent tree (I would have preferred this). As a new player, it would’ve definitely streamlined everything a bit more and kept it consistent.
One thing I will say is, I’m not an “alt” type of guy. I like to have 1 main character and explore the world with it. So after reading more about these covenants, the idea of having to create 3 additional characters just to experience all 4 covenants storylines completely is a big negative. Unless there’s something more recent available where we can swap them at will and just play them all with 1 character.
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This was highly favored as the approach to take.
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The tryhards and wannabes will still follow the 1% attempting to get that additional 0.5% increase in dps. lol
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Yeah, I didn’t like the idea of being locked into something and “having made the wrong choice”
They really should have just disabled cov abilities for raiding or something so people wouldn’t gripe and moan about them.
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Pulled for some classes, not for others. Impending Catastrophe does 1.3k dmg as a fresh 60 and Mindgames does about 4.2k. Tell me how that’s fair at all.
First of all, ripcord has not been pulled, and it in fact cannot be pulled (or does not exist) according to the man himself. If you don’t know what exactly #ripcord is, please visit the thread and educate yourself.
If you are not happy about what’s happening with covenant in Shadow Lands, Blizzard is the only to blame. Don’t misplace your contempt.
Could have made that point without referencing a streamer. It would make the comment hold more credibility.
… What kind of backwards logic is that? “Being more vague with your source would make it more credible!” … What?
Ion has done several interviews, I specified one without directly linking to the video. Honestly, even then, I should have probably linked to it for reference. How does directly referencing a factual point, that in a very specific interview, Ion made a statement suddenly become less credible vs just vaguely saying “Ion said it!”
Walk me through that thought process, I am curious. How does being more specific in terms of where a statement was made becomes less credible?
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Well, common sense isn’t exactly common on the WoW forums, so your argument probably would’ve been seen as more credible if you hadn’t mentioned Preach.
Just the backwards nature of this place.
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Yeah but when we told them we wanted more alt friendly we didn’t mean we wanted to play 4 carbon copies of the same class/spec. We meant we wanted it friendly so we could play different classes.
Player: Hey Blizz we want to play more alts
Dev: Hey boss we have a hunter here that wants to play more mm hunters
Player : No I want to play more alts as in other classes
Dev: Sorry boss our bad the hunter wants to play more alts so he can do each spec on a different toon
Player: 
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So then, what is the primary mechanism by which we gather power for the final confrontation? I was studying the covenants and thought some of them were pretty cool. If I’m not earning those then what am I earning?
Personally, I’m a fan of talent trees that improve your basic abilities (e.g. This talent reduces cooldown of spell A, this other talent gives Spell B a 10% chance to hit a second time, Follow this branch for slightly better AOE, follow that branch for slightly better single target, follow this other branch for more survivability, etc.) I liked also liked essences that you earn that eventually give you an extra big hit every minute.
Nobody said being more vague. But referencing streamers is some weird sycophant kind of behavior.
I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just saying it like it is.
I feel the same but I also feel shoehorned when it’s “you’re one thing only”. Sure, we can swap talents but then it almost begs to why even have them? That’s why I love and hate the new talents.
I just wish we had more diversity.
That’s a good point. As soon as I see someone say “according to “streamer name”, I stop reading.” I never understood the obsession. Little creepy.
But thats not what has been said. The comment was “In the interview with streamer name he said…” and either the shaman is purposefully trolling again or he misunderstood that this was just done as a reference to something Ion actually said in that very interview cause someone was crying about the term “ripcord”.
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THANK YOU!
Yes, that is exactly what I was saying! I mentioned what the literal Game Director said and where he said it, which happened to be in an interview with a specific streamer, nothing more. My goodness GD is getting more and more absurd each day with some of the responses where apparently just saying a streamers name is akin to being a sycophant… It seriously gets crazier and crazier every day with some of the responses, I swear.
Thank you Gromgarr for being a voice of literal reason.
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