What Changed in Freehold?
The Council o’ Captains is the second listed dungeon encounter in Freehold, which generally involves the players joining a Captain and their crew to fight against the remaining two captains. As the dungeon currently functions in patch 10.0.7, the Captain and crew players join is on a three week rotation that alternates between the following:
- Captain Jolly of the Cutwater Corsairs
- Captain Raoul of the Blacktooth Brawlers
- Captain Eudora of the Bilge Rats
Now, with the removal of the Captain rotation, we will only ever join with Captain Jolly and his crew, while we will only ever be fighting Captain Raoul and Captain Eudora during the Council o’ Captains Boss encounter.
Originally, you would also join the crew of the allied captain, making them appear as friendly units. However, in a recent PTR build all Cutwater Corsair trash enemies now remain hostile despite being allied with Captain Jolly. Most of the crew-specific trash 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
Normally, these allied crew would leave the dungeon after defeating the Council o’ Captains boss encounter. However, all of these enemies now remain in the dungeon after defeating the Council o’ Captains in addition to remaining hostile.
What are the Implications?
Given that we are always allied with Captain Jolly, that means we will always be fighting Captain Raoul and Captain Eudora for the Council o’ Captains boss encounter.
Historically, the difficulty of the Council o’ Captains boss encounter varied from week to week due to the Captain rotation, where the two versions of the encounter that had players fighting against Captain Eudora were generally considered much more difficult than the last version of the fight where she was your ally. While the version of the encounter we will be seeing in Season 2 of Dragonflight is one of the harder versions, the removal of the captain rotation will make the encounter difficulty consistent from week to week (outside of affix changes). For Season 1 of Dragonflight, similar changes were made to the Lorewalker Stonestep boss encounter in Temple of the Jade Serpent, which originally had two separate versions before returning as a Mythic+ dungeon.
As for the trash, there were pros and cons to removing trash count from the dungeon by allying with a crew and defeating the Council o’ Captains. On some weeks groups actively chose to delay allying with a crew in order to set up larger trash pulls in the second portion of the dungeon, particularly when the enemies being removed from these packs were perceived as relatively easy. For better or worse, this feature added routing complexity to the dungeon and, with the feature being disabled, the trash packs will now always be full-sized in the second section of the dungeon.
