How i got my 3 surfaces to work properly:
as per tascam power up multiple firewire devices starting with the furthest device from computer
(this assigns the devices in the correct order to the windows firewire interface)
FE-8 + FE-8 + FW-1884 + computer (this is also the physical layout)
setup workspace (in my case 16 midi + 16 audio) tracks
open the mixer F3 and in “Visibility Tab” hide the 16 audio “INS” shown / close mixer
Add the 3 Mackie Control Devices with 1st=FW-1884, 2nd=FE-8(1), 3rd=FE-8(2)
open the mixer F3 now the 16 FE-8 faders are assigned correctly to midi “out” 1-16 and the 8 faders on the FW-1884 are correctly assigned to audio 1-8 “out”
(note the other 8 audio i/o #9-16 are not assigned to faders in my setup as they exist via ART 8 chan ADAT rarely used)
(seems the mixer channel visibility setting presents what and the order of the channels assigned to surface control)
Signed
A Happy Camper
ps my previous post about this identified it as a probable bug (broken mackie) i thought i better post this solution so the engineers dont break it for real while trying to fix it its ok it works guys! 
lol