Despite the importance of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) to the climate system, climate models struggle to represent the complex interaction of coastal processes that govern its formation, leading to large uncertainty in AABW projections. Previous studies have highlighted the role of ice shelf basal melting in slowing AABW formation. However, latent heat loss associated with ice melting is often neglected and meltwater is prescribed at the surface. Here, we investigate the AABW response to melting scenarios by injecting meltwater at depth and explicitly accounting for latent heat loss using ACCESS-OM2-01 simulations. Our results reveal strong sensitivity to these processes. Under a moderate melting scenario (pan-Antarctic anomaly of 0.015 Sv), including both deep injection and latent heat loss reduces the AABW slowdown from ~30% to ~11% relative to surface injection without heat loss. In a high melting scenario (0.1 Sv), the response shifts from a complete shutdown to a ~54% reduction. Sensitivity experiments highlight the dominant contribution from latent heat loss, which offsets shelf freshening by inducing sea-ice formation and brine rejection, effectively reducing the AABW freshening and its slowdown. These results underscore the need to accurately represent basal melting processes in climate projections.