Vanquished Tentacle no longer aggressive in Patch 1.13.6

The most recent patch changed the behavior of Vanquished Tentacle of C’thun such that the guardian no longer attacks NPCs that are in combat with the player until the tentacle directly takes damage from the NPC. This bug seems related to the issue with hunter pets in 1.13.6, but the recent hotfix to pet behavior did not fix the issue with the tentacle.

Two forms of bugged behavior have been observed:

  • When the tentacle is summoned prior to combat starting, it simply does not attack the NPC until if/when it takes damage. This is the most consistent issue with the AI; an easy way to reproduce it is to pre-pop the trinket before pulling a mob and then position the mob such that the tentacle would normally attack it.
  • Sometimes the above behavior takes place even when the tentacle is summoned in the middle of combat. I experienced this yesterday evening when summoning it in the middle of the Maexxna encounter in Naxxramas (stationary boss that never moved). The tentacle simply did nothing until it took damage, after which it attacked normally. This is inconsistent, and members of the druid class Discord have reported cases of the tentacle both working and not working when summoned in the middle of combat on raid bosses.

The new changes to behavior kills the viability of this trinket in PvE encounters, where it was previously used by several classes as a significant DPS boost.

Also linking to this thread on overall Guardian AI opportunities since Phase 1:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guardian-ai-bugged/438689

I noticed a similar issue with the tentacle on Razorgore in BWL on Monday night (Dec 7). I popped it while in combat from bear form next to some adds in Phase 1, and the tentacle never attacked anything until it despawned.