Lethality & the legendary drip, rebuilt

How v0.17.0 rebalanced The Ember Depths: monsters that can hit you, telegraphs priced in health, a legendary cadence of hours not minutes.

For a long while the Depths stopped fighting back: a geared hero was hit only on perfect rolls, and orange loot rained at about 12.8 legendaries an hour across all players. This pass rebuilds both dials on the game's own math — the d20, your armor class, and the drop tables — and every number below is the live rule, not a promise.

Monsters aim at your armor now

A foe's attack bonus is computed from the armor class a typically-geared hero actually has at that level, so roughly half of ordinary swings land — up from one-in-twenty at level 20.
The pressure ramps: foes land about a third of swings at level 1 and reach the full target by level 10, so the early game stays forgiving until your subclass is in hand.
A landed hit costs a fixed share of health instead of an ever-growing dice roll — more hits, but never a one-shot. Armor still matters: every point is a flat miss chance for the monster.
Telegraphed attacks (slams, charges, meteors) are priced in shares of health too — a boss slam is about 40%, a bomber's fuse about half. Stand in a telegraph and it hurts; step out and it whiffs entirely.

The legendary metronome

	before	after
Legendary share of an item roll (Normal)	~0.19%	~0.04%
Typical legendary cadence	minutes, plus floods from pity	~2–3 h, pity counter guaranteed
World tiers VI–XIII	no extra odds (clamped)	odds keep growing, ~0.7%/roll at Torment X
Uniques	~1 per 2–3 h	~1 per 5–6 h
Boss loot	6 rolls + epic	4 rolls + epic, set piece ~1 in 20

First clears are a schedule, not a lottery

Grukk's Warcamp (Act I): a class set piece, as before.
Morvaine's Sanctum (Act II): now guarantees a free legendary for your class on first kill — the campaign's second orange, earned around Day 2.
Acts III–V finales keep their guaranteed class uniques; the unique channel opens at level 10.
Hard, Epic and Legendary modes now shorten the legendary pity (×1.2 / 1.5 / 1.9) — cadence, not flood.

Tuning lives in two knobs: HIT_FRAC (what a landed swing costs) and the hit-rate caps in engine/run/spawn.ts. The sim plays thousands of runs with a bot that never dodges telegraphs — expect your own death rate to sit well under its numbers.