Troubles Finishing off Romulus in ITF

There are 2 problems with this fight - 1) the healing nictus, which heals more for every player or player ally (pets etc.) in a large radius of itself, and 2) the autohit nictus which uses uses a roughly 400 damage autohit PBAoE attack constantly.

When you approach Romulus and his spawn initially the healing nictus is the one on your left (east) side and the autohit nictus is the one in the back.

1) can be solved by having a melee kite the healing nictus away, by sniping it at range, by unsumonning weak pets, by using -Special debuffs e.g. Benumb from cold domination, or by having enough debuff/damage to power through its heals.

2) is solved by making everyone carry orange inpirations and eating them, by having +res buffs, by making a melee kite it away to prevent it wiping the team or by having players skilled enough to recognize the FX of the autohit attack and not stand inside it.

The Cimeroran ambushes and Rom himself are comparatively easy and can be handled even by underlevelled teams.

It's amazing to see so many posts echo "kill the nictus first" and not the following, which I have done on every single ITF I've ever run and it works 100% of the time:

Beat Romulus until he stops resurrecting. Seriously. Ignore the Nictus, deal with adds as needed, and just hammer his face until he doesn't rez anymore. It has never once failed me, even on poorly made-up teams.

Have the Cold Benumb the healing Nictus to lessen its heals.

when itf first came out i know we would seperate rommy from the nicti and beat him down. I cant remember exactly how we did it back then but i think one tank would pull rommie away, while a tank type character would keep the nicti angry at him and it was pretty easy unless one of the tanks were morons. you could try that if you cant just beat him down. i did it last night and there was one person wondering if we had the damage to take him down because we were controller heavy with either 3 or 4 controllers, but when we got to rommie he went down fast so yall should be able to do it.

Well, we tried most of the suggestions in the thread, all at the same time.

And it worked.

Several of us ran BB for Shivans the night beforehand, and two of us even got Warburg nukes. I bought a bunch of Backup Radios and Envenomed Daggers, ginned up a few thousand Architect Tickets to buy the salvage, and e-mailed the recipes and salvage around to the group.

But the biggest factor was the one nobody suggested because it's not supposed to be possible: add more team members to an already-in-progress Task Force.

I'd forgotten two other friends had originally joined the TF. They hadn't been present for last week's adventures, which ended with our frustration against Romulus. But they returned this week, adding a Fire/Stone Melee Tanker and a Traps/AR Defender to our strength.

So, when we finally got back to the final fight, we discussed splitting the attention of the nicti from Romulus with the two Tankers, pulling to the grass, and keeping the squishies at range during the battle. We talked about the importance of distributing the buffs and debuffs for best effect. We bought inspirations.

And then the Tankers pulled the bad guys onto the grass while we, at the last moment, summoned Shivans and PPD Hardsuits and hit Call to Justice and Build Up and ate our skittles like crazy, and we opened the ENTIRE can of whoop*ss on Rommy. And we threw in a few Envenomed Daggers for good measure. And Benumb and Acid Mortar and so on. And this time his health immediately started to drop visibly.

So we poured it on and won the day.

I think we mostly concentrated on Romulus, but the second and subsequent beatdowns went a lot faster, so we felt that, in a lucky turn of events, the first nictus to be absorbed was the Healing nctus, which helped a lot.

Thanks for the advice and kibbitzing! I'd like to hog the credit for my preparing radios and salvage for everyone (I even had spares which came in handy when the two forgotten players returned), but in reality it seems more likely that adding two entire superheroes was the most important addition to our strength.