Automatically Join the Captains
The Council o’ Captains is the second listed dungeon encounter in Freehold, and, as the encounter currently functions in patch 10.0.7, players need to perform a task to join a Captain and their crew. If you do not perform this task, you will need to fight all three captains (instead of two) while they have twice their normal amount of health and damage from the effects of Under One Banner. Needless to say, it is not intended for the players to fight the encounter in this state.
With the current change on PTR, the players now join a Captain (and not their crew) automatically after defeating Skycap’n Kragg, removing the need to perform a task to join a crew. Additionally, since you no longer join the allied captain’s crew, the associated enemies no longer retreat from the dungeon after defeating the Council o’ Captains boss encounter. The following clip shows a group approaching the Council o’ Captains after killing Skycap’n Kragg, except that only two of the captains are hostile despite not having performed any extra events (thanks to AutomaticJak for providing the clip!):
Original Mechanic
Which of the three Captains and crews you were able to join in Freehold, as well as the task you need to perform to join them, was determined by a three week rotation as follows:
- Captain Jolly of the Cutwater Corsairs
- Captain Raoul of the Blacktooth Brawlers
- Captain Eudora of the Bilge Rats
Joining the Cutwater Corsairs
In order to join the Cutwater Corsairs, you had to free Otis from his locked cage, which involved chasing Murphy, a dog, through five separate locations until he fell asleep, which allowed you to loot a set of keys off of him that you could use to open Otis’ cage.
Murphy would change locations whenever a player got near him, though at least three of these locations were surrounded by packs of enemies that were relatively unpopular to kill. And so, while you always had the option to clear away these enemies, it was possible, and sometimes preferable, to use a stealth class, an invisibility potion, or a sacrificial player to complete the event without killing these enemies.
Joining the Blacktooth Brawlers
In order to join the Blacktooth Brawlers, you had to kill a group of six Blacktooth Brawler enemies that were specific to this week and also rewarded trash count.
Joining the Bilge Rats
In order to join the Bilge Rats, all members of your group had to gain the Bilge Rat Brew buff, which was gained from interacting with one of many Bilge Rat Grog Jerk NPCs. For the purposes of this event, all players could get this buff from the same NPC and it was possible to join this crew without engaging any extra enemies.
Impact on Trash
Back when you joined a crew, all trash units associated with the crew you had allied with became friendly. Most of these enemies are present in the second section of the dungeon and are listed as follows:
Cutwater Corsairs: Cutwater Duelist, Cutwater Knife Juggler, Cutwater Harpooner
Blacktooth Brawlers: Blacktooth Brute, Blacktooth Scrapper, Blacktooth Knuckleduster
The Bilge Rats: Bilge Rat Padfoot, Bilge Rat Swabby, Bilge Rat Brinescale, Bilge Rat Buccaneer
After defeating the Council o’ Captains encounter, these friendly enemies would leave the dungeon. That being said, most of these “friendly” enemies were tied to groups with other hostile enemies. If you engaged these groups before defeating the Council o’ Captains, it was still possible to fight some portion of the allied crew for trash count.
Implications
Now that all players automatically join one of the Captains (and not their crew) after defeating Skycap’n Kragg, this affects players in a few ways.
First, here are the direct effects of not having to perform tasks to join a Captain and crew, which vary depending on the week:
- Removing the Cutwater Corsair task either improves route flexibility or allows players to avoid using a workaround for the event.
- Removing the Blacktooth Brawler task removes a mandatory trash pack, completely, from the dungeon. Allowing players to obtain this trash count from other sources.
- Removing the Bilge Rat task has little to no direct impact.
Second, being able to ally with a crew and have the associated trash enemies retreat from the dungeon gave groups the option to fight certain packs of enemies either with or without the allied crew present. This feature provided more routing options, but also made routing more complicated. Now trash packs will always be in their largest state in the second section of the dungeon regardless of player actions.
