Revision 1

The Defiant is the Xol Tier 2 heavy melee unit, and it is not built from scratch. Two Xythers merge into one, with a further 150 hexite and 50 flux paid on top. What arrives is 500 health behind 2 armour with Heavy armour type, hitting ground targets for 40 damage on a 1.25 second cycle, and carrying a retaliation mechanic that no other unit in the faction has: being attacked fills an ABES energy bar, and at full the Defiant releases a pulse that damages everything around it.

Figures below describe the September 2026 Early Access build, the one carrying the identifier ZS.c36778, and they move with the weekly patch cadence. Roughly half the versus roster had a stat touched in the fortnight before that build was captured, so treat every number here as dated rather than permanent.

Stat Block

Weapons

Abilities

The entity record lists no separate activated ability and no passive. The energy retaliation is implemented as the second weapon above rather than as an ability entry, which is why ABES Pulse appears in the weapons table with an energy cost instead of a cooldown.

Upgrades

No Defiant specific upgrades exist, and the Defiant has no molten mode. The World Forge upgrades reach it as a Xol army unit.

World Forge Armor is worth singling out here. The Defiant already carries 2 armour, and two ranks near the Forge stack on top of that, which compounds unusually well on a unit whose whole plan is standing in incoming fire.

Conversion Costs

Replicate is the Xol conversion mechanic, paid out of the same top bar power pool as the Grell Infuse and the Legion Reanimate. Rather than buffing a unit it copies one, producing a second body from an eligible ally. Since the balance pass of August 11, 2026 it also works on molten units, at twice the usual power cost. Eligibility is not universal, and the tags on a unit record are what say which of the three conversions apply. The Defiant is eligible for all three at an identical 10.625 power each. That is expensive by Xol standards, and it is worth weighing against replicating two Xythers at 3.75 each and merging them instead.

Role

The Defiant is a punishment unit. Every weapon pointed at it charges the bar that eventually hurts whatever is pointing it, so the more attention it draws the more it contributes, and 500 health behind 2 armour and Heavy armour type means it draws attention for a long time. Armour is a number as well as a type. It subtracts a flat amount from every incoming hit with a floor of 1 damage, so it blunts many small hits far more than one large one. Two armour against ten hits of 4 damage cuts 40 damage down to 20; against one 40 damage hit it saves 2. That maths is why massed cheap attackers are the worst thing to throw at a Defiant and why single heavy weapons are the right answer.

Vector Slash at 32 damage a second is the highest sustained single target output in the faction below Tier 3, but it reaches only 1.5 and only on the ground, so a Defiant that cannot close is a 4 supply body doing nothing. Move speed 575 is quick for the weight class and is the mechanism the faction gives it for closing.

The merge cost changes how the unit is priced. A Defiant is not 150 hexite and 50 flux, it is that plus two Xythers, which is 300 hexite of prior investment and 4 supply of prior army. In exchange the Unmerge change of August 11, 2026 lets a player split it back into two Xythers for free on a 20 second cooldown, so the investment is recoverable in a way that a built unit is not.

Faction Context

The Defiant unlocks at the Molten Core, the Tier 2 structure that also unlocks the Echo, the Synapse and the World Forge, and which opens Tier 2 mercenary hiring. It is one of five Xol units assembled from other units rather than produced, alongside the Echo, the Synapse, the Gravitron and the Eradicator. See Units for how the shared stat block is read and Resources and Economy for the top bar power pool the conversions draw on.

Counters

Balance History

Notes

The roster record for this unit is COMPLETE. Every core field is published.

The ABES Pulse entry publishes a damage figure, a range, a splash value and an energy cost, but no cooldown, because the release is automatic rather than triggered. The record also does not publish how much damage taken fills one point of ABES energy, so the frequency of the pulse in a real fight cannot be calculated from the data.

The Biological tag removal is a categorisation change in the data layer rather than a studio patch note. No dated studio post names it, so its practical effect, if any, is unconfirmed.

Per unit numbers are drawn from a community maintained entity catalogue that the studio links from each of its own faction pages. It is the only place the full stat block is published, and it is not a studio document, so the figures are best read as careful community documentation of a build rather than as an official specification. Dated balance notes, by contrast, come straight from the studio patch posts.