A couple days after buying Dragonborn, I noticed that none of my followers were saying their cool dialogue lines like, "Nerevar guide me!" "I am master of the arcane!" "I'll rip your heart out" "Die, Dragon!" etc. during combat. In the dialogue menu of the CK, these are the lines that are classified under the Combat > Taunt category. The really stange part though is that they would continue to use all other triggered dialogue, including other combat dialogue like what triggers when they take damage, along with detection lines that trigger when combat starts or ends.

After reloading some old saves, I was able to isolate the event that causes taunts to stop triggering. It's the moment you first travel to Solstheim on the boat. For whatever reason, after that sequence followers will never taunt again, even if you go back to Skyrim and get into combat there. It's strange because having Dragonborn.esm itself activated in the load order doesn't prevent followers from taunting so long as you have not yet traveled to Solstheim.

I am using Ultimate Follower Overhaul along with a few custom follower mods of my own creation. One of the custom mods adds dialogue, including in the taunt category, but caused no conflicts before. Also, all the custom dialogue with the exception of taunts continues to work for the custom follower. I don't think mods are the problem however, because I disabled literally every mod in my load order, backed up then deleted my entire scripts directory in my data folder, loaded a save from before I traveled to Solstheim, got a vanilla follower, tested to make sure they could taunt in combat in Skyrim (which they could), took the boat to Solstheim, and still for whatever strange reason, once I was there they would no longer taunt when I was in combat.

So this leads me to believe this might be a bug on Bethesda's part that accidentally disables taunting for most NPCs because of the new taunts they've added for Dragonborn.esm. Has anyone else noticed this with their followers, and does anyone have any ideas for things we might be able to do or where to start looking in the CK to find the source of this problem?