Show us your final expression. BTW, you may check your variants here toohttps://www.phpliveregex.com/ (just don't paste the ~ signs from the beginning and the end). So my trick ^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d).{16,}  works fine there too. The point with ! @ %^&*  may look like:

^(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*\d)(?=.*[@#%&]).{8,}

This variant will require a one ncessary special symbol.