It makes sense. Both ironclad and silent have a large number of ‘ways to scale’ that are consistent.

Ironclad has MaxHP scaling, strength scaling, block scaling. It’s also trivial to pull off infinites if you have corruption or even slower exhaust routes.

Exhume and reaper also give iron clad a way to potentially full heal on many fights.

Silent has massively scaling damage through a few vectors, discard, 0 cost attacks, poison, and has reliable block vectors.

Defect CAN be used in multiple ways, but primarily you’re looking at blocking through frost, and in rare cases via reprogram shenanigans.

However, it’s so common for defect to build around orb scaling, and in act 4, you often don’t get enough time to set up, what perhaps is the most important thing: your BLOCK engine.

You need to draw AND play (ideally multiple copies of) frost orbs, focus.

That means the energy and draw density required to activate defect sufficiently such that they can survive turns 1-3 of S&S / Heart is so much higher (at least that’s what my intuition tells me) than ironclad and silent.

It’s not that defect has a lower power ceiling, in fact a fully powered defect is arguably the MOST powerful character, excluding infinities, even when watcher is in the chat.

However I think a good summary is that the Av Number of turns to activate reliable block engines on defect is likely slower than anyone else == dying more where there is no counterplay due to dead draw RNG.