The Raven Trickster

Overview

The Raven Trickster, also known as Tangmazu, is the pinnacle boss of Delirium. He is the Strange Voice that narrates Delirium encounters, and he is fought by bringing a Raven's Reflection to The Withered Hollow and placing it in the mirror. Every kill drops one item from a guaranteed pool of six uniques, with a smaller chance of shards and his thurible on top. Runs are short, which is most of the appeal.

Setup

One Raven's Reflection per run, placed in the mirror at The Withered Hollow. Nothing else is consumed. The Reflection is the whole cost of entry, so how cheaply you can buy them in bulk decides how well this strategy runs for you.

The Encounter

He also appears inside the Simulacrum, but functions as an NPC there rather than a fight, so time spent in Simulacrum will not prepare you for this. The source page's skill list is still a stub, so this article does not cover his abilities. Go in expecting a pinnacle-level fight and treat your first Reflection as a learning run rather than a profitable one.

How These Numbers Were Calculated

These figures are modelled, not recorded. Nobody ran a hundred kills and reported the results. Instead the published drop rates are treated as a synthetic sample of 100 kills: a drop with a 35% chance is counted 35 times, a 2.5% chance 2.5 times, and expenses are one run's Reflection multiplied by the same 100 runs.

The rates come from the source page's own sample of 234 kills on version 0.5.0, and that page labels them estimates. That is a small sample spread across nine outcomes, so the rarer rows carry real uncertainty. Over a short run of kills your results will differ, and the guaranteed pool is the only part you can rely on.

One number dominates everything else. The Raven-Touched Shard accounts for roughly 97% of modelled profit despite dropping on about one kill in forty. Every other drop combined, including the guaranteed unique you get every single kill, makes up the remaining 3%. This means two things. Long stretches with no Raven-Touched Shard are normal and are not a sign the strategy is broken, and the profit figure moves with that one item's price far more than with anything else on the list. If it falls, this strategy stops being worth running.