King in the Mist

Overview

The King in the Mists is the Affliction league boss, fought in the Crux of Nothingness. Every kill drops one of four guaranteed uniques, and roughly one kill in ten also drops a Perfect corpse. This strategy only counts the high-value Perfect corpses: Regular and Imperfect corpses, and the cheap Perfect ones, are worth too little to matter and are left out.

Setup

• An Audience With The King: one per run, used in the map device. It comes as a reward from Ritual encounters.
• Run time: about 1½ minutes per kill, start to finish, including portals and loading the map device. This is an estimate for a good build that clears the fight cleanly, not a measured time. Dying during the maze phase cuts time.

The Encounter

• Mystic Fetish: he teleports to a platform and activates a fetish. Each one stacks Portent Vapors (increased damage taken) and adds an arena hazard: exploding toads, boiling blood or caustic ground.
• Ritual of Dance: for 8 seconds, standing still imprisons you, then Maims you.
• Ritual of Meditation: for 8 seconds, moving imprisons you, then Maims you.
• Bug Bomb: in phase three, a large purple orb that deals physical and chaos damage and applies Shadow Surge, a physical damage over time that speeds up.
• Mystic Miasma: standing near him while his staff is raised applies cold and chaos damage over time.
• The maze (phase two): Branching Affliction stacks on you until you follow the Sacred Wisps to the purple portal. Dying or logging out skips the phase, and re-entering puts you straight into phase three.

How These Numbers Were Calculated

• The method. These numbers are not from recorded runs. They are a synthetic sample of 100 kills built from the wiki's published drop rates: a 40% drop counts 40 times, a 20% drop counts 20 times. Expenses are one Audience times the same 100 runs. The hourly figure spreads the net total over 1½ minutes per run, which is an assumption, not a measurement.
• The corpse split is assumed. Half of all kills drop a high-value corpse and a fifth of those are Perfect, so 10% of kills give a Perfect corpse. The wiki says the chance is weighted by monster but gives no weights. It is split evenly over the 22 monsters that can drop, about 0.45% each, and only the ten worth farming are counted.
• The rates are estimates. The unique split comes from 576 kills crowdsourced in 3.26.0. Real results over a short run of kills will differ.

More than half of the modelled profit comes from one drop: the Perfect Forest Tiger, at a modelled 0.45% chance, about one kill in 220. Its real chance is unknown, because it rests on the even split above. Most of the rest comes from The Light of Meaning, which drops on one kill in five. Long stretches without a Tiger are the expected result, not a sign the strategy is broken, and a dry streak leaves the guaranteed uniques as the only steady income.