PoE 2 Delirium Guide 0.5.0 – Fog, Simulacrum & Tangmazu Boss

Patch 0.5.0 didn't just tweak Delirium in Path of Exile 2: it gutted the whole thing and handed you a new skeleton. What used to be "walk into fog, collect splinters, cry" is now a structured endgame loop with a quest, a hub, a narrative, and a pinnacle boss who would very much like to see you dead. Elder Madox is trapped inside a delusion. Tangmazu is the architect of it. You are the volunteer.

The mechanic triggers when you enter a map containing a Delirium Mirror: an interactable portal near your spawn. Step through it and the entire map fills with fog. Enemies hit harder, take less damage, and drop things normal mobs wouldn't dream of. Leave the fog and it resets. Stay, and things get considerably worse before they get better.

The bottom of your screen now shows a progression bar tracking fog depth and time remaining. It is not decorative. Watch it.

Fog Mechanics & Mirror Shards

The fog expands as you move away from the mirror's starting point. Standing still is not a strategy: it's a slow death. Killing enemies fills your reward bar. Delirium fog mechanics reward aggression: the further you push, the more you earn, and the more enemies try to repay that debt in pain.

Two types of mirror shards complicate the run across PoE 2 services:

Fractured Mirrors on the map spawn additional mob waves when approached. Do not ignore them unless you have a compelling personal reason to leave rewards on the floor.

Getting Into Delirium

Maps with Delirium encounters PoE 2 are marked with a black-and-white mirror icon on the Atlas tooltip. You'll see them naturally as you map. For a guaranteed encounter, insert a Delirium Precursor Tablet into a Lost Tower. The tablet's implicit modifier dictates how many nearby waystones get infected. Explicit modifiers apply to all uncompleted maps within the tower's radius: use this combination deliberately.

Instilling a Waystone directly with a Distilled Emotion also adds Delirium layers: but this does not stack with a Delirium Mirror. Pick one. Do not waste both.

Requirement for Simulacrum Splinters

Splinters only drop from Tier 11+ Waystones. If you are farming low-tier maps expecting splinters, that is your own fault.

The Hare and the Raven: New Quest

The rework introduced a named endgame quest. After the Journey's End events where you release Tangmazu, the next Delirium Mirror encounter triggers a meeting with Elder Madox, an NPC whose mind is presently a hostage. He asks for help. You oblige, because there is loot involved.

From Madox, you head west toward the Withered Willow: a new hub area surrounded by Delirium-afflicted maps. This hub acts as your base of operations for the entire loop. The Tangmazu boss fight PoE 2 lives at the end of it, gated behind sufficient effort.

Completing Delirium Mirrors now has a chance to spawn a Grand Mirror on a nearby Atlas map. A Grand Mirror duplicates the map boss, forcing a double fight. Kill both. This unlocks the Trial of Madness.

Trial of Madness & Simulacrum

The Trial of Madness Path of Exile begins after triggering the Grand Mirror kill. Fog spreads across the Atlas from a chosen map. Every delirious map starts at 10% Deliriousness. Killing Rare monsters and map bosses pushes that number toward 100%, which unlocks a locked Simulacrum. You can push further, up to 200%: maps at that level are not subtle about their intentions.

Simulacrum: 15 Waves

Collect 300 Simulacrum Splinters. Place them in the Realmgate. Enter. Survive 15 waves of escalating enemies with rotating negative modifiers. The Simulacrum endgame PoE 2 removes corpses: builds dependent on on-kill effects will malfunction spectacularly here. Plan around it or suffer the consequences of not planning around it.

• After each wave, loot drops. Stash it before clicking the NPC to start the next wave or it gets deleted. This is stated plainly and players still lose items.
• Kosis and Omniphobia can spawn from wave 5 onward. Omniphobia is the warm-up. Kosis is a DPS check with consequences.
• Completing all 15 waves grants 2 Delirium Passive Skill points and a Simulacrum-exclusive unique item.
• Completing the fog-shrouded maps eventually yields a Raven's Shard, which opens access to Tangmazu as a pinnacle encounter. His drops include the Voices unique jewel.

Higher Simulacrum difficulties aggressively bias drops toward specific uniques. Run difficulty 3 or 4 if you want the Melting Maelstrom. Run lower difficulties if you want a lot of tries and less heartbreak.

Everything in Delirium funnels into Distilled Emotions crafting PoE 2. Fog enemies, Simulacrum waves, and bosses all drop them. A full 15-wave Simulacrum run typically yields 70+ drops. Post-quest completion, enemies can drop Potent variants that unlock modifiers unavailable through any other crafting method.

Use Distilled Emotions on amulets to instill Notable passive skills: the same ones from the passive tree, except now they live on your neck. Liquid Emotions amulet anoint functions like Essences for gear: deterministic, targeted, finite. Do not waste them on bad bases.

Applied to Waystones, they add Delirium layers, increasing monster density and enemy count. The map becomes harder. The rewards do follow, if your build handles the PoE 2 pre-orders.

You earn Delirium Atlas passive points by completing maps that are afflicted by Delirium: visible on the map tooltip before you enter. The Delirium Atlas passive tree PoE 2 received significant restructuring in 0.5.0. Every Simulacrum clear grants 2 points; difficulty must increase each time you want a new Notable node.

Priority Notable nodes: get these first, in this order:

• "You Can't Just Wake Up From This One": increases rewards with minimal drawback penalty
• "Get Out Of My Head!": expands Distilled Emotion drop rates across encounters
• "They're Coming To Get You": improves overall encounter yield without punishing your damage

Other notables carry trade-offs. Read them before allocating. Some are traps engineered specifically for people who don't read.

Bosses Reference

The Delirium pinnacle boss encounter pairs Tangmazu with a reflected, empowered version of the map's own boss. It is not subtle. It is not fair. It is the point of the entire PoE 2 Divine Orb, and Voices is worth the inconvenience.

Run Checklist

1. Locate Delirium Mirror near spawn: it has a shattered-glass, multicolored appearance.
2. Step through it. Do not walk away from the fog: the encounter resets.
3. Push forward. Kill everything. Fill the reward bar above your flasks.
4. Interact with Purple shards if your build survives the difficulty spike.
5. Survive Red shard arenas. Exit. Collect.
6. Collect 300 Splinters (T11+ maps only). Build Simulacrum. Run it.
7. Stash loot after each wave. Every wave. This will be forgotten at least once.
8. Use Distilled Emotions on amulets and waystones deliberately, not impulsively.
9. Complete Grand Mirror double-boss for Trial of Madness access.
10. Push Deliriousness to 100% minimum, 200% for masochists and the loot-obsessed.