I was looking at my combiner wars stuff and I wondered. If the five components of defensor merge into one mind do they all die if the combiner is killed. It's never come up in the g1 show and I don't read the comics
It is said that the relatively undamaged components can survive, although they suffer severe psychological trauma. Just look at Superion, he survived Devastator ripping him in half with only one component lost (the 'most damaged' one).
When Superion got his shit wrecked by Devastator in IDW's Transformers-formerly-RID they all sustained heavy damage and were knocked offline for several months, with Slingshot being either too far gone to save (his spark was literally hanging out of him) or needing far more extensive work done to get him up and running, it was kind of ambiguous for toy-related reasons. The ones who take less damage survive, but it still takes a serious toll on them.
I don't think combiners themselves die. As evidenced by G1 Devastator, a well placed shot simply separates the members back into their individual bot forms. I can't remember if this happened with any other combiner, but it seems as though they're just stopped, not killed.
If the body is completely damaged (i.e. completely submerging them in a smelting pool) the combiner might perish, but otherwise the less damaged components will survive.
In LSotW we see that it takes a lot to kill any transformers, getting ripped in half not always fatal.
This is probably the most accurate. If a Cybertronian is in their alt mode (in this case, combined mode) and heavily damaged, they revert back to bot mode automatically. And if a specific member has sustained sufficient damage, they'll retain that damage after reverting.
Actually the body reverts to it's preferred state, which is sometimes the Alt mode (according to IDW).
Dont forget Scrapper was killed in IDW by Spike and Devastator still combined in Chaos albeit with a dead leg. lol
