World Boss Meta: The First Month

The World Boss is the one fight every account runs, every day, on every server. One boss per day, seven bosses on a weekly loop, and one difficulty tier added each week. It is scored, not cleared: the boss never dies, so all that matters is how much damage a team puts out inside the 90 second window.

That makes it the cleanest read on the game there is. Everyone fights the same boss, on the same day, under the same rules, and the ranking publishes the exact five characters each player brought. This is what the first month of those rankings says.

What this is built on

Every number below comes from the in-game top 100 rankings themselves, read across seven servers between 16 August and 7 September:

• 15,102 ranking entries
• 1,818 distinct players
• 287 guilds represented
• 142 separate ladders, counting each boss, tier and server once
• 47 of 57 characters seen at least once

Server 2 is a special case. Its ladders were read off video recordings rather than from the ranking screen directly, so it contributes its top score, its median and its 100th place, but not the teams behind them. It appears in the server comparison at the end and nowhere else.

Those ladders were logged day after day by the members of STARDUST and STARDUST2, on every server they play on. A ranking only stays readable for a couple of days after its fight closes, so a day nobody writes down is a day gone for good, and they did not miss one in a month.

Every entry carries the player’s damage, their Power, and the five characters they actually fielded. Where a comparison would otherwise be polluted by server or week, I compare inside a single ladder: same boss, same tier, same server, same day.

The three that never leave

Three characters are effectively mandatory, and the higher you look, the more mandatory they get.

Character	Picked	In the top 10	In ranks 51 to 100
Jotaro Kujo	96.7%	99.7%	94.8%
Giorno Giovanna	78.1%	94.6%	72.3%
F.F.	76.5%	91.3%	68.8%

Jotaro is the damage. His Ultimate stacks Retribution up to 40 times, and every stack feeds both his shield and his Attack, so a run that keeps him alive and swinging simply out-scales one that does not. Giorno and F.F. are what keep that going. Giorno is the team’s battery: 200 Energy to everyone at the start of the fight, another 200 to everyone each time he casts a skill, and 300 more to one ally on his Ultimate, all while healing off his own Max HP instead of off Attack. F.F. covers the healing from 8 tiles away and adds its own Plankton Colony damage on top. Nothing else in the roster replaces that engine, and the top of every ladder knows it.

Caesar Zeppeli is the line between the pack and the top

Here is the single most consistent thing in the whole month. Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli is the fourth most played character in the game at 63.9%. He appears in 72.7% of teams ranked 51 to 100, and in 31.9% of teams in the top 10.

That gap holds on all seven bosses. It also holds at every level of investment: sorting each ladder into ten Power bands, teams with Caesar deal less damage per point of Power than teams without him in all ten, and the gap widens the richer the account gets. In the top Power band, teams without him score roughly half again as much per point of Power as teams with him.

His kit explains it. Almost all of Caesar’s output is written for a crowd: his basic attacks ricochet to other enemies within 2 tiles, his bubbles hit all enemies on the path, and his Bubble Barrier is built around a 100% Immobilize. Six of the seven World Bosses put a single body on the field. There is nothing to ricochet to, nothing to catch in the barrier, and the Hamon rider that does fire on the undead bosses is capped at a percentage of Caesar’s own Attack, so it never scales with the fight.

He is a genuinely strong character in content that has more than one enemy. He is a habit on this one.

The two flex slots are where runs are won

With Jotaro, Giorno and F.F. locked, two slots remain. Holding that core fixed and comparing what fills the last two seats, the answer barely changes from boss to boss.

The pairs that score highest are built on Koichi Hirose, and the pairs that score lowest are built on Caesar. Koichi is picked by only 29.1% of the ladder, and 37.8% of the top 10. His Onomatopoeia tags an ally, and from then on that ally’s basic attacks have a 60% chance to add damage equal to 160% of Koichi’s Attack, while his Ultimate hands that ally two stacks of Attack Speed Up. Put that on Jotaro and the whole thing compounds: faster attacks, more procs, more Retribution stacks, higher Attack.

That is the shape of the entire World Boss meta in one line. The fight rewards anything that makes the carry hit more often. It pays almost nothing for area damage, and nothing at all for crowd control.

SR characters go up, not down, at the top

The part of the data I did not expect. The top 10 of a ladder fields more SR characters than the middle of the pack, and fewer all SSR teams.

	Top 10	Ranks 51 to 100
SSR share of team slots	89.5%	91.0%
SR share of team slots	9.1%	5.4%
Teams that are five SSR	54.9%	62.5%

Two SR supports drive it. Robert E· O· Speedwagon goes from 7.7% in the middle of the pack to 19.3% in the top 10, and he is the strongest single addition on Tarukus, Wamuu and Akira Otoishi. He refunds 200 Energy when an ally casts an Ultimate, once every 5 seconds, shields off his own Max HP, and hands three stacks of Attack Speed Up to everyone he empowers. Kenzou goes from 3.9% to 13.3%, and his flat 10% Crit Rate to the whole team is pure damage on a boss that carries zero Crit Resistance. His Crit Resistance shred does nothing here, but nobody is bringing him for that.

Both cost nothing to obtain. If your fifth slot is a poorly built SSR, one of these two is very likely an upgrade.

Boss by boss

The core is the same everywhere. The last two slots are not, and this is where the seven bosses actually differ. In each table, “overall” is that character’s pick rate across all seven bosses, so the gap is what makes this fight specific.

Tarukus

The friendliest boss on the rotation and the one where the support package matters most. Giorno’s pick rate climbs to 87.1% here, the highest of any boss except Wamuu, and Speedwagon posts his best numbers of the week.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Giorno Giovanna	87.1%	78.1%	98.0%
Bruno Bucciarati	27.2%	28.8%	41.5%
Speedwagon	14.1%	11.2%	23.5%
Prosciutto	32.2%	38.4%	15.0%
Ermes Costello	9.3%	5.2%	0.5%

Ermes is the clearest trap on the board. Nine percent of the ladder brings her, and she appears in one single top 10 team out of two hundred. A Defense character has no job in a pure damage race.

Wamuu

The highest support requirement of the seven. Giorno hits 90.0%, his ceiling, and 99.0% in the top 10. Wamuu hits hard enough that the runs which fall apart are the ones that lose a body, and Speedwagon’s shields peak here too at 25.5% of the top 10.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Giorno Giovanna	90.0%	78.1%	99.0%
Speedwagon	16.5%	11.2%	25.5%
Koichi Hirose	26.4%	29.1%	37.0%
Diavolo	22.3%	26.7%	24.5%
Bruno Bucciarati	23.9%	28.8%	36.0%

Cool Ice

The first of the two Agility bosses. Bruno Bucciarati and Diavolo both jump about eleven points above their own average here, and both hold that in the top 10. Kenzou also has his second best showing, at 20.0% of top 10 teams.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Bruno Bucciarati	40.2%	28.8%	47.7%
Diavolo	37.6%	26.7%	41.8%
Kenzou	8.8%	5.7%	20.0%
Prosciutto	28.5%	38.4%	8.2%
Caesar Zeppeli	58.2%	63.9%	23.6%

Prosciutto collapsing to 8.2% of the top 10 here is the sharpest single reading in the month.

Akira Otoishi

Reads almost identically to Cool Ice: Agility up, Prosciutto down, and Speedwagon strong. If a team works on one of these two, it works on the other.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Diavolo	36.5%	26.7%	39.1%
Bruno Bucciarati	36.7%	28.8%	45.0%
Speedwagon	15.9%	11.2%	30.9%
Prosciutto	28.2%	38.4%	11.4%
Caesar Zeppeli	56.3%	63.9%	24.5%

Notorious Chase

The exception, and the one boss that genuinely rewrites the team. Notorious Chase is the only fight on the rotation that puts three bodies on the field, a main target plus two 30 million HP companions. Everything that was dead weight on the other six suddenly has targets.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Caesar Zeppeli	76.3%	63.9%	56.4%
Koichi Hirose	41.7%	29.1%	48.6%
Mohammed Avdol	16.0%	9.5%	8.2%
Bruno Bucciarati	11.3%	28.8%	10.9%
Diavolo	16.2%	26.7%	14.1%

Caesar is picked more here than anywhere else, and this is the only boss where the top 10 keeps him at over half. Koichi’s 2 tile Onomatopoeia burst hits everything at once and he peaks at 41.7%. Meanwhile the two single target Agility specialists fall off a cliff, Bruno down to 11.3% from a 28.8% average.

This is also the highest scoring fight of the week. The Tier 4 median on server 1 was 124.1 million damage, roughly double what Tarukus asked for on the same tier.

Risotto Nero

Bruno’s fight. He posts his highest pick rate of the rotation at 45.6%, and 62.2% of the top 10, the strongest single character signature outside the mandatory three. Kenzou also reaches 20.0% of the top 10 here.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Bruno Bucciarati	45.6%	28.8%	62.2%
Kenzou	7.9%	5.7%	20.0%
Giorno Giovanna	67.9%	78.1%	94.4%
Caesar Zeppeli	63.6%	63.9%	23.9%
Diavolo	29.3%	26.7%	28.9%

Giorno is worth a note here. His pick rate is at its lowest of the rotation, 67.9%, and yet he is in 94.4% of top 10 teams. The pack skips him on this boss more than anywhere else, and the pack is wrong.

F.F.

Prosciutto’s fight, and the only one. He jumps 24 points above his own average to 62.3%, and unlike everywhere else the top 10 keeps him, at 54.4%. Koichi has his best showing of the whole rotation here at 58.9% of top 10 teams.

Character	Here	Overall	In the top 10
Prosciutto	62.3%	38.4%	54.4%
Koichi Hirose	37.3%	29.1%	58.9%
Bruno Bucciarati	15.1%	28.8%	12.8%
Diavolo	16.6%	26.7%	10.6%
Ermes Costello	7.2%	5.2%	0.0%

If you only build Prosciutto for one day of the week, this is the day.

How far the ladder moved in one month

A difficulty tier is added every week, so the bar moves fast. These are server 1’s numbers, and every other server followed the same curve one step lower.

Two things stand out. Median Power roughly tripled in three weeks, from around 450,000 to around 1,400,000, which is the normal shape of a first month. But the damage needed to hold a top 100 place grew faster than that, because players were not only getting stronger, they were getting better at the fight.

The top of the ladder pulled away hardest. Wamuu’s best score went from 114 million to 530 million in two weeks while the top 100 median only doubled.

Where the servers stand

Same boss, same tier, same day, different server. This is the top 100 median on each server’s most recent tier.

Server 1 is ahead on all seven, which is what a head start buys. Behind it the order moves around: server 7 takes second place on four of the seven despite opening later, and on Risotto Nero and F.F. it sits much closer to server 1 than to its own neighbours. Server 2 is the other one worth watching, third on four of the six bosses where it can be compared at the same tier. Notorious Chase is the exception in that column: server 2 was still on tier 3 the day the others ran tier 4, so there is nothing to compare.

The newest servers sit at the bottom, but the gap is far smaller than the age difference would suggest, because a newer account entering the rotation today skips the whole discovery phase.

What I take from the first month

Team choice is worth more than raw investment. Across all 142 ladders, top 10 teams carry 1.39 times the Power of teams ranked 51 to 100, and deal 2.86 times the damage. Power explains part of that gap and nowhere near all of it. The rest is which five characters got fielded.

Build one carry properly before spreading. The core three appear together in 58.1% of all top 100 teams and in 86.2% of top 10 teams. A fully built Jotaro with Giorno and F.F. behind him beats five half built SSRs on every boss on the rotation.

Six bosses want the same thing, one does not. Attack speed, Energy and uptime on the carry are the currency on Tarukus, Wamuu, Cool Ice, Akira Otoishi, Risotto Nero and F.F. Notorious Chase puts three bodies on the field and is the only fight where area damage pays, which is exactly why Caesar peaks there and the Agility specialists disappear.

Two free SR supports beat a weak fifth SSR. Speedwagon and Kenzou both roughly triple their pick rate between the middle of the pack and the top 10. That is not nostalgia, it is players discovering that Energy refunds and team wide Crit Rate outscore a low investment SSR body.

The obvious pick is not always the right one. Caesar sits in 63.9% of all teams and 31.9% of top 10 teams. Koichi sits in 29.1% of all teams and is the strongest flex on six of seven bosses. If there is one change to make to a World Boss team this month, it is that one.

Thanks to STARDUST and STARDUST2

Nothing on this page came out of a spreadsheet someone filled in once. It is a month of players opening the same ranking screen every single evening, on seven servers, and keeping what they saw. That is the whole reason this article can say what the top 10 of a ladder actually fields instead of guessing at it.

So: thank you to every member of STARDUST and STARDUST2. Both guilds are active on the World Boss every day and both are recruiting, so if you want to sit on the side of the ladder these numbers come from, that is where to knock: guild.jojogs.dev/join.

Related

Crit System: why Crit Rate and Crit Boost keep paying off on every World Boss tier, and why there is no resistance to shred.

Fighting Styles: what each class passive actually does, including the Agility bonus that makes Bruno and Diavolo boss specific.

How Damage Works: the formula behind every number on this page, from Attack through Defense to the final hit.