In reply to TJ.

Oh no! The plugin we discussed, Reversed Comments Pagination, is now broken with 4.4 and I am at a huge loss on how to fix.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/fix-reversed-comments-pagination/

If anyone has and idea to solve, please respond. It is the beginning of our seasonal traffic that spikes significantly with 1000s of comments per hour an having a blank page with 1 comment appearing at times is not ideal.