Defy
What it is
Legendary fire-tagged beam weapon. A persistent cone, anchored at the ship and aimed at the closest enemy at fire time, applies damage-over-time to every enemy inside its volume. The cone’s visual and hitbox are the same object — a live shader renders the flame and the engine collides against the same shape it draws. No projectiles, no embers; the cone refreshes each tick. Auto-aims at the closest enemy and can hit destructibles. As a legendary, it does not appear in weapon chests.
Stats
Damage values shown are per damage tick (fireRate = ticks per second). Cone length is acquireRange × travelRangeMult. Level scaling uses the front_loaded curve (see concept-scaling-curves), and a damage-only multiplier curve is applied on top of the per-tick base (see concept-damage-multiplier-curve). Legendaries multiply the damage curve by the L20 baseline so an L1 legendary already hits at the curve’s peak.
| Stat | L1 | L10 | L20 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acquire range | 210 | 295.6 | 324 |
| Cone length (range × 1.3) | 273.0 | 384.3 | 421.2 |
| Damage per tick (base) | 9.0 | 101.8 | 132.5 |
| Damage tick rate (ticks/s) | 10.0 | 15.0 | 16.6 |
| Damage curve multiplier | 1.30 | 2.50 | 7.50 |
| Legendary baseline multiplier | 7.50 | 7.50 | 7.50 |
Fixed values:
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Cone width (full angle, degrees) | 32 |
| Warmup before first fire (s) | 0.08 |
| Travel range multiplier | 1.3 |
| Rarity | legendary |
| Damage tag | fire |
| Family | beam |
| Behavior | cone_beam_dot |
| Target mode | closest |
| Collision mode | first_hit (unused by behavior, retained for schema) |
| Can hit destructibles | yes |
| Firing group | false |
Horizontal-modifier scaling rates and feel parameters:
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Damage per horizontal level | +5% |
| Fire rate per horizontal level | +8% |
| Area mode | cone_width |
| Cadence pattern | [1] |
| Cadence step (s) | 0.02 |
| Ship pulse strength | 0.15 |
| Sonar pulse scale | 1.1 |
| Post-FX duration (s) | 0.04 |
| Chime timbre | bronze |
| Recoil sx / sy | 0.96 / 1.03 |
| Recoil duration (s) | 0.05 |
| Recoil kick | 1 |
| Fire shake amp / dur (s) | 0.5 / 0.06 |
| Hit shake amp / dur (s) | 0.4 / 0.04 |
Visual palette (used by the live shader’s blackbody ramp and the 2D fallback):
Behavior
On each fire interval the weapon re-aims at the closest enemy in range (see concept-target-modes) and refreshes a persistent cone in front of the ship. The cone is a 32-degree wedge whose length equals acquire range × 1.3. Every damage tick, every enemy whose body overlaps the wedge takes one hit of fire-tagged damage; the tick rate is the weapon’s fire rate. Range, cone angle, and tick rate all update live — when an upgrade changes any of them, the in-place cone resizes on the next frame.
Because the cone is a shape, not a projectile, the standard collision mode and ember count fields are inert on this weapon. The first_hit collision mode is retained only to satisfy the weapon schema (see concept-collision-modes). The ember count is fixed at 1 across all levels; bonus-projectile upgrades have no native effect on this weapon at present.
Damage carries the fire tag, so it triggers any artifact or effect keyed on fire damage (see concept-damage-tags). Damage type is default-normal, so shields absorb before hull.
Scaling
Per-level effective stats are computed by remapping raw level 1–20 through the front_loaded curve, then evaluating base + scaling × (effectiveLevel − 1) for each stat. The front_loaded curve front-weights growth — early levels gain most of the absolute increase, with diminishing returns into the high teens.
| Stat | Base | Per-level scaling | Curve |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acquire range | 210 | 6 | front_loaded |
| Damage per tick | 9 | 6.5 | front_loaded |
| Damage tick rate (per s) | 10.0 | 0.35 | front_loaded |
| Projectile speed | 1 | 0 | unused |
| Projectile size | 1 | 0 | unused |
Final damage per tick at runtime equals the table’s base damage × the damage-multiplier curve × the legendary baseline (7.50) × any early-level buff and horizontal-modifier damage bonuses. The damage multiplier curve interpolates piecewise-linearly through anchors at L1 = 1.00, L4 = 1.25, L8 = 2.00, L12 = 3.00, L16 = 5.00, L20 = 7.50, with an additional flat early-level buff of +30% at L1 decaying 5% per level to 0 at L7+ (see concept-damage-multiplier-curve).
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: Cone-beam DoT collision/render coupling (live-shader-equals-hitbox model, refreshed each fire tick, in-place resize on upgrade) appears on this weapon and is described in code on the cone_beam_dot behavior — promote to a concept-cone-beam-dot.md page if/when a second weapon adopts the same behavior, otherwise keep here.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: Legendary damage-baseline rule (legendary weapons multiply the damage-multiplier curve by the L20 baseline of 7.50 so L1 legendary ≈ normal L20) is shared by all isLegendary weapons and is owned by the helper module — belongs on concept-damage-multiplier-curve, referenced from here.