By the way, they only appeared all on the same side for one of our splits, so it looks like there's just a random chance of it happening. Sounds like you had a run of bad luck.

This "change" had better be unintended ... Skeram porting and insta-nuking tanks already were annoying, but this - argh!

Yeah, the changes to the bug family and the annubisaths seem alright in that it makes the encounters more interesting, but the change to Skerem feels more like a bug.

By the way, one person on the R&D forum said he thought the annubisaths had their health or armor reduced. Can anyone confirm or dispell that idea? This would make sense. They make the annubisath encounters more exciting by forcing you to fight all the possible spell combinations but at the same time nerf the annubisath's health to keep the difficulty of the overall encounter about the same. Any truth to this?

Dealing with the various combos isn't that big of a deal, it was just a pain in the ass due to their huge HP pool. If they reduced the armor and HP of those bastards it wouldn't be nearly as much of a pain to deal with the various combos =|

I got more details from my guildmates regarding the change to the Huhuran encounter (that I sat out for another priest):

My healers were complaining a lot more about silence last night. I just figured it was cause they sucked. :P

Also, I do remember thinking to myself the anubs were dying faster as well, so maybe the HP pool did get released.

This is a very good option as well. Almost all my mages were fire, and the ones that didnt reflect fire got penatrated in an unconfortable place.

We did the annubisath clears last night, and I didn't notice big change in their health. It's possible still that there might have been a small change or as sqiffy suggested, it could be that we're just experiencing the fact that the mages can output so much more damage now. The change forcing you to fight all four spell combinations definitely made things more interesting. Despite wiping a couple times on combinations we weren't used to, the clear ended up taking less time than it normally did, because we weren't sitting there the whole time waiting for the hunters to get lucky and pull the "right" spell combination each time.

We also ran into a strange bug with Viscidus. Due to some server lag spikes, we lost a lot of people during the fight and ended up wiping at 1%. (It was so disheartening to see him freeze up but not have enough people to hit him and cause him to shatter). We set up for the second attempt and this time, Viscidus had the same size hit box he had when he was a tiny 1% health blob, so our tank had to tank him way inside the blob, and our dps classes had to stand much closer to be in range of hitting him. Right as he froze up, our main tank got hit by a poison clound, and the only way to shatter Viscidus was to get right in the middle of him where the poison cloud was. We lost a lot of people to that. Shattering him seemed to reset his hit box, though. We would have tried again, but we had to give up for the evening when the server finally crashed out for good.

We killed the bugged Skeram last night.

A few hours later, one of the other guilds banging their heads against Skeram reported that the encounter had been hotfixed back to 'normal'.

Skeram ports were fine last night. Yauj healing wasn't a big change either.

Here is an idea I just thought of (not really on topic, but on the subject):

It may be cheating but mark skeram with the skull (any raid icon really) and it should stay on him the whole fight. Makes the transistions a little easier.