When targeting other characters and performing emotes, there were times when the animation would not be displayed properly or there’d be a weird side effect caused when doing so. In 1.20 we changed the specs so that emotes would not be performed in the direction of the targeted character but this was left out of the patch notes.
In 2.0 we will be making it so that it will be possible to face a target and perform an emote. While we are unable to fix the current system until 2.0, we are looking into ways we can re-implement this in some way now.