First of all, let me make it clear that I have never done this fight in 8man and likely never will. Our guild focuses completely on 16man progression and will always do that if applicable. Therefore, any of my observations mentioned here might or not might be present in 8man. From the second-hand information I have, I cannot confirm it.

Now moving on to the important stuff. We noticed several bugs, erratic behaviors and incosistencies during the encounter on 16man hard mode and we were wondering if these are intended by the developers.

1. During the warm-up phase, 4 Fingers spawn at random spawn points around the entire length of the room. Where they appear is completely unpredictable, sometimes all 4 spawn close to each other, sometimes they spawn at the opposite ends of the room. Since tanks are busy dealing with the Hands, obviously the DPS need to kill the Fingers as quickly as possible. However, the Fingers have a tendency to immediately target someone (usually a Sage/Sorc healer because of their AoE heal aggro) and kill him before anyone can react. They apply a stacking debuff that increases the damage of their consecutive hits and 4 stacks of that debuff immediately applied to one person is just unhealable. They do not always go for the same person, in fact, most of the time they target different healers, but sometimes they do and when they do that, there's nothing the group can do.

Is it intended that all four Fingers can fire at and apply debuffs to the same target, immediately after appearing at completely random and wildly different parts of the room with no delay whatsoever? At least at Corruptor Zero the tanks have the time it takes for ranged adds to descend to the ground to pick them up before they all target and kill one healer.

2. During Brontes' first damage phase, the lightning balls behaved very erratically. It appears that they do not come with a prefixed aggro table or at least with a buggy one. They were regularly switching targets, although the visible tether stayed connected to their original target. In one instance, we tried having taunt-capable DPS pick them up, but it appeared that they could only be controlled for the duration of the taunts. What was even weirder was that after the taunt had worn off, the ball picked a random new target who was not affecting its aggro table in any way. Sometimes the balls just switched targets without any taunting.

Is it indended that the lightning balls behave so erratically and unpredictably? Is it intended that they sometimes just switch targets? Why are they half-tauntable (e.g. controllable for the duration of the taunt)? Why not make them fully controllable or not controllable at all? For that matter, could red text be added to indicate the targets of the lightning balls (like at Soa), because in the cluster**** of melee DPS, tanks and healers on Brontes, the tether's endpoint can rarely be seen.

3. During Brontes' lighning transition phase, the lightning beam behaved very erratically. Instead of going around the room in a clockwise fashion, exploding the droids, it started following random people but not doing any damage whatsoever to the group, despite repeatedly hitting 8-10 people in its path. In addition, only one droid spawned instead of the usual 5-6 and that particular droid did not explode when the beam touched it.

What makes the beam behave so erratically and unpredictably? Is this an intended mechanic?

Hey,

1) Whenever on of our healer (happens rarely, but happens) gets one shoted by this, his reaction is "sorry, my fault". And guess what, that is correct. It would require incredibly unlucky RNG for all tentacles to target same player if he does nothing towarsd it. And not throwing a heal at the wrong moment is a part of healing skills as well

2) Now this, we never saw before. Only time we experienced lightning ball switching targets, is when original target dies to something else than this ball's explosion. That said, we never tried taunting. As we never encountered this, I cant really help on the matter. If balls really swap targets and its not caused by death or by sage Force Barrier, or by scoundrel/shadow vanish, that would be a bug and should be reported. Taunting also potentially could lead to just reseting agro, so I wouldnt count it.

3) Yes, this is a bug. We never encountered it ourselves, but I saw it on few videos. All it does, is making fight easier. So definetely not the worst of bugs, but of course should be fixed

About N°2, I can confirm that sometimes lightining balls target you, start building stacks then switch to another target without any visible reason.

Happened to me as you can see here on Manalyssaa's twitch. At 01:17:01, the ball at the top right hand corner on the screen starts hitting me. Then, at 01:17:07, it switches to Mana and then 1 second later to Grantz. It followed Grantz til he made it explode. Coincidence or not, all three of us are heals.

Healers can definitely respond to the fingers all attacking a healer when they spawn. Instead of simply not healing, we just expect it. I even purposely try to get them to all aggro me because I'm going into that at full hp. Rejuv myself prior, bubble, take the hits, self heal, healing trance and then they are attacking someone else. If I see a different healer get nailed then it's bubble, healing trance them. The only 2 reasons I see healers being unable to react is because they lack gear and therefore hp and/or they just aren't that good at reacting quickly to things.

Haven't really seen those bugs. Maybe the beam following a player once.