Odrogg weirdness or Family Familiar change?

[Alien]

This evening I took my max level non-world-quest-unlocked character over to Odrogg. I could not challenge him. I brought over a character with world quests unlocked and that character could.

Does anyone know if something changed, or if Odrogg is in some way special, or if perhaps I'm just having some personal technical malfunction?

[Quintessence]

There's another discussion on this undocumented change here.

It seems that the alt-method is no longer reliable or consistent. Patch 7.1 seems to have broken it.