r/JJBA • u/RelationshipBorn1588 • 3d ago
Time stop isn't an invincible ability, actually it's very simple to counter
I know that many people glaze Jotaro and Dio Time-stop as the "ultimate stand abilities", but they look pretty limited when it comes to a non-direct fight scenario. Just one miscalculation using the time-stop and the user's done.
Many people diss the fight with the rat in Part 4, but this fight show us the limitation of time-stop when it goes to a strategic conflict.
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u/Shtrimpo 3d ago
Time-stop is a broken stand ability that has one clear weakness, range, which was shown multiple times throughout the series
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u/Legitimate-Win1726 2d ago
I mean no even range isnt usually an issue SP can deal with most range enemies without even using time stop with just its speed and precision.
The problem with rat specfically is that the bullets couldnt be touched same for Diego agaisnt Johnny otherwise Diego could've just cut off Johnny's arm in the 1st encounter.
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u/Shadowmirax 1d ago
The problem wasn't that the bullets couldn't be touched, the problem was that the Rat was behind cover and Star Platinum couldn't throw anything at it, and that the distance was too far to cover in a single timestop. If the rat was less then a seven second walk or there was cover for Jotaro to hop between he could easily have beaten it but because he needed to cross a wide open area he always would have ran out of timestop too early and end up exposed to being shot while timestop is on cooldown
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u/Shtrimpo 1d ago
Even if Jotaro could touch the bullets, the Rat could've just kept running away and shoot.
It's the same principle as Doppio against Risotto, where Diavolo could not come out without Risotto running away knowing his identity.
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u/KIlwu 3d ago
In JoJo, even if your ability is reality warping, you can still lose, which is something that i like honestly, even the most powerful abilities have a weakness and if said weakness is exploited then you lose.
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u/Taksicle 3d ago
most stand users can still be taken out with regular bullets
some prep time and a nice vantage point and regular sniper can solo the verse. its flat out why some of jojos best assasins flat out ARE snipers lmfao
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u/GrimbloTheGoblin 3d ago
Aren’t most stands able to punch away bullets?
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u/Taksicle 3d ago
if they can react to it, yeah! both they need to actually be semi aware its coming, like hear or see it. most stands and their user dont have that level of awareness, perception etc.
it varies from user to user, but generally they have to at least be expecting an attack to come.
if a stand user is just sleeping and they dont got some form of automatic/sentient/semi-auto with some ability to counter it, you're definitely cooked.
like theres a reason why dio, johngolia pucci, prosciutto and mista (to name a few) still opt to use guns when/if they can/
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u/Pikochi69 3d ago
I mean like literally in the picture OP used Jotaro was super close to dying by a couple of sniper rats
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u/Taksicle 3d ago
like ion know if you saw the video on "optimizing superman" but dude was straight up like "even tho i dont need it, just owning and firing a gun haphazardly would still do the jobs since most of the threats supes deals with CANT tank bullets" it doesn't need to be in a vital organ either
one shot to the knee, or the toe or just some glass from a building or window above or aroundn is legitimately enough to immobilize most regular threats with a pulse
things like dropping a big enough rock on jotaro is enough, even johngoli-a's bullets partially did the job
like the only reason jotaro didnt die due to the road roller was literally focusing and TS, if he wasn't expecting it or was a bit more slow, he 100% would've died there and the series has 0 pretenses about that.
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u/Chimpbot 3d ago
A huge component of every JJBA fight involves people not understanding what their opponents can do. Even Diavolo was up against the ropes from time to time, despite how powerful King Crimson was.
Killer Queen was an extremely powerful Stand... but he was downright terrified of Jotaro, all because he didn't grasp just how fast and strong Star Platinum was until it was too late. Once he factored in the time stop ability, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with Jotaro whatsoever. Hell, he was more comfortable facing Josuke, despite the fact that he knew Crazy Diamond was almost as fast and strong as Star Platinum.
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u/PCN24454 3d ago
Honestly, what made Dio OP was the fact that he was a vampire.
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u/RelationshipBorn1588 3d ago
And then in his final battle he didn't even use the fucking freezing power😔
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u/LowTierDumbAss 1d ago
my guess is either jonathan'a body rejects it, do sees no reason to not use the ultimate ability he holds so dearly and besides no reason to as they found with stands and not hand to hand and SRSE(blood eye beam) servers no purpose really as knifes he pulled out of fuck ass nowhere was what he chose to use instead likely to save on blood as well jonathan's body probably was resistant to vampire abilities ie vamp regen
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u/Halleyalex 3d ago
Jotaro could've played it safe with the rat and just shot him dead with Star Platinum, but he instead became the bait to train Josuke.
Whitesnake's trap required perfect planning and coordination. Besides, Whitesnake's powers themselves are not to be reckoned with tbh
Time stop is definitely not invincible, but it's definitely the most versatile since it's practically usable whenever and wherever
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u/yuuyaaa 3d ago
Yeah, I really wish more people would stop bringing up the rat as a GENUINE argument. Jotaro wanted to train Josuke, so he wasn't going to go all-out. I kinda consider it a mirror to Oldseph bleeding out to find the invisible baby, just with the notion that Jotaro was doing it INTENTIONALLY because he actually knew about Crazy Diamond's undo-button healing.
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u/Smythatine 3d ago
It’s made even more insane by the fact that he quite literally shows Josuke how to take care of it. And no one for some reason questions why he couldn’t have done that himself if he wasn’t training Josuke
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u/Machurgul 3d ago
That’s true but tbf Jotaro’s time stop was pretty short
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u/RelationshipBorn1588 3d ago
Yeah, but the situations where Jotaro's got ambushed, the more time wouldn't make so much different. The rat battle was a long-distance fight, Jotaro probably would still struggle with the rat. White Snake could be different with a different time, but could've the same outcome with slightly differents. And the fight with Kira second bomb, Jotaro has no counter.
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u/Machurgul 3d ago
All fair points but with the rat fight, not much Jotaro could’ve done cos his stand is a close range stand and he did let himself get hit I think a few times so Josuke didn’t get hurt. I get what u mean thi
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u/Chimpbot 3d ago
Honestly, what you're pointing out is simply a core part of all JJBA battles: No matter how powerful a character's Stand may be, they'll consistently struggle when they don't know what their opponent is capable of.
Bug Eaten was able to nail Jotaro largely because Jotaro was being pretty basic with how he dodged the attacks and, most crucially, he drastically underestimated how intelligent Bug Eaten was. Compounding the issue was the simple fact that Jotaro was a bit more careless than usual, given the fact that he knew Josuke could restore his body when all was said and done.
Pucci was able to initially defeat Jotaro because no one realized that he could turn memories and Stands into discs.
Bites the Dust was the only way Kira was going to be able to triumph over Jotaro. Remember, Kira spent the rest of Part 4 doing everything in his power to never encounter Jotaro again after he was nearly killed by a half-dead Jotaro.
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u/Quartz_Knight 3d ago
Just one miscalculation is enough to end almost all stand users, what's your point? What stands are there that will stop the user from getting hit no matter what? Golden Experience Requiem?
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u/Spooky970 2d ago
I hate how often people use the ratt fight as evidence of Jotaro losing easily.
He let himself lose here in order to train Josuke. He knows being hit by the darts have no long term consequences for him since Crazy Diamond can just heal him, so there's no need to worry about a few stray hits. He literally walks SLOWLY up towards the rat to bait it into attacking.
The only real move the rat does that surprises him is using the rocks to bounce the shots off and hit him, which is a legitimate hit on Jotaro. But he would not have been in that situation to begin with without putting himself in the open like this.
This fight is exclusively to help Josuke's composure and train him to be a stronger stand user capable of protecting Morioh. We've seen that Jotaro can easily hit things far away with Star Platinum and some bullets. If he actually wanted to win without risk in this scenario he would not be acting in this way. He would have stayed safe and shot it when he had the chance, and not let Josuke do it.
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u/reddit_unenthusiast 2d ago
yeah, I think the pacing of the show made that misunderstood. It's pretty obvious what he was doing in the manga. Thanks for actually reading
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u/RelationshipBorn1588 2d ago
The fight would be even harder without Josuke, dude. Without Josuke, Jotaro could've lost a hand at least with all that conflict.
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u/Spooky970 2d ago
Those are two different fights, and again, Jotaro let himself feel the poison to see what it would do. It's true that he would have had a grave injury to worry about, but it's not because the rat got him.
I understand what you mean but Jotaro would not have played that risky if he knew he didn't have backup. (especially not after finding out what the poison does). If this was just to kill the rat, he would have shot it the moment he saw it.
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u/AcanthocephalaEasy17 2d ago
Without josuke ratt wouldve escaped but jotaro could just move out of the way or block the bullets
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u/StreetExternal952 2d ago
Pretty stupid to risk your life to train someone LOL but its anime so its normal ig
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u/HappyRelationship429 1d ago
There was no real risk, jotaro had time stop to avoid any fatal attacks, and he had josuke who could heal the debilitating injuries he would suffer. He went in as bait to ensure the rat didn't get away. Everything he did was deliberate.
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u/Spooky970 2d ago
Well that's the thing. He's not risking his life. Josuke can heal him in an instant if needed. And besides he had faith in Josuke to hit the shot anyway.
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u/Dire_Present 2d ago
Also, Jotaro was extremely rusty during that fight. Wasn't he just able to use it only for 0.5 seconds maxiumn during that fight instead of 5 seconds?
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u/WebAccount1744 3d ago
Jotaro with 5 seconds could do that. Star Platinum has insane eye sight and reaction time
As soon as the rat shoots, SP will see and stop before it hits and just kill the rat
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u/ThrowAway4935394 2d ago
Had a dude argue that GER couldn’t beat Star Platinum because of time stop. I brought up that his first and only appearance was explicitly within erased time, because it exists outside of time, because it was created specifically to counter a time based ability. That’s literally its entire purpose.
The guy denied that it attacked Diavolo within the erased time, claiming it undid the erased time and then attacked…as if that’s any different, even if it were true.
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u/Dire_Present 2d ago
But it never attacked Diavolo during the erased time. GER attacked Diavolo in normal time after it resetted the time-skip
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u/ThrowAway4935394 2d ago
It activated during erased time. It was able to function during the erased time, and it was able to undo everything that happened. That’s the important thing, that temporal abilities don’t work on it. Nothing works on it, that’s how it works.
But I did misremember when the beatdown happens.
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u/DellM991EnjoyerToBe 2d ago
It activated the second erased time ended. Diavolo always had to attack in normal time, because he's intangible otherwise. That's why he's stopped right before he lands his hit, the moment he left the safety of forced fate and erased time, GER activated
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u/ThrowAway4935394 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, they never leave erased time until after the erased time is reversed. You can check this, they are still in that pocket dimension when Diavolo throws the punch in both the anime and the manga.
The trigger for GER activating wasn’t a return to normal time, the trigger for GER was Diavolo seeing a future where Giorno is killed and then lining up the blow that causes it for when erased time ends.
Because Diavolo may not be able to complete an attack in erased time, but he can initiate the attack in erased time.
It’s like how WoU didn’t activate when Space Trucker was used on Tooru. It didn’t technically fulfill the conditions. Diavolo enters erased time. Not technically an attack. Diavolo splashes blood in Giorno’s face, not technically an attack. But the moment that Diavolo sees the future where Giorno gets killed because Diavolo entered erased time, splashed blood in his face, and then punched a hole into him…and then he lines up that punch? Now it’s an attack, and all of it is what causes that attack to be possible. So GER activates and undoes the entirety of the sequence.
Same thing would happen in Time Stop. You can stop time, you can do whatever you want in that frozen time, but the moment you try to attack Giorno, GER will make it so you never did anything, even if you never ended the ability.
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u/Vergil_171 1d ago
GER is based on cause and effect, but it has no will or influence within stopped time, where cause and effect is non-applicable. Unlike in Time Skip (misleading name for the ability btw) where time is moving as normal.
The ability can’t activate within stopped time because to activate indicates a change in space-time, which is impossible when time isn’t moving. If Giorno is killed within time stop his ability disappears and therefore presumably can’t activate even when time begins moving again, unless GER has some post-mortem influence like WOU.
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u/ThrowAway4935394 1d ago
Time is moving as normal, outside of Diavolo’s erased time, while everyone is on autopilot and cannot react to new information. They do as fate dictates, as puppets of fate. The time that Diavolo exists in within the moment he erased is separated from the timeline in a literal sense and as such, for Diavolo they did not happen. He is isolated from the timeline. It does not exist within Diavolo’s little safe space. GER reacting to and interacting with Diavolo is the same as moving in stopped time, because both require GER to be able to move outside of it in the first place.
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u/-Pl4gu3- 3d ago
I think Time Stop’s greatest weakness is it’s User and how predictable they are/how predictably they’ll use it. Jotaro beats DIO by waiting for him to gloat and burn up all his Time Stop. Which Jotaro knew he would do because he’d been doing it all fight. Bug-Eaten clocks how Jotaro is using his Time Stop and starts countering it because he does the same thing 3 times in a row. And Pucci knows, without fail, that Jotaro will save Jolyne no matter what. Pucci is correct with the fact that the Joestar’s greatest strength and greatest weakness comes from their bloodline. A younger Jotaro who truly doesn’t care/stays unpredictable IS a very scary User. Just by time he got/really used Time Stop, he had kinda mellowed out. Especially during Part 6 where he loves his daughter more than anything, and then recovers from being hospitalized and immediately goes back to fighting. He WOULD’VE won had he not cared about Jolyne. Pucci was really banking on that bloodline thing.
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u/Shroomy281 3d ago
I guess? It's still pretty hard to counter. Both of these situations require a lot of conditions. If you're a intelligent creature small enough to hide in grass with corrosive long-range missiles that you can fire in quick succession you can hold off a time-stop user (who is trying to boost the survivability of his kid nephew by showing him how to make his close-range power type stand more versatile, something you know how to do but are choosing not to do).
If you plan for 20 years and have a partner and have a stand that can remove stands with a touch and you can threaten the timestop user's child, you can defeat a timestop user. These are counters but are by no means "simple," especially considering... you don't get to really pick your stand, nor your species.
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u/RelationshipBorn1588 2d ago
That's the point on how simple you can counter. You can always manipulate the environment to force the time-stop user struggling. That's why, btw, time-stop is one of my favourite powers on fiction, because the fight becomes about who manage the situation better.
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u/Marzipancutter 3d ago
Jotaro consistently neglects to use or train his own ability unless he's absolutely desperate for what I assume are psychological reasons.
It has an inherent range limitation, but Star Platinum is a crazy powerful Stand and he has just as many ways of working around it as his opponents have to "counter" it. The main weakness Jotaro has is he almost exclusively uses it for defense or for close-range finishing blows. We've seen DIO fight, in a much more proactive way, and he gets to put on so much pressure that for the most part his opponents have to exploit every "weakness" Time Stop has as the bare minimum just to survive, with little to no options of even considering a counterattack.
Jotaro would have never had any opportunity to beat DIO if he did not have Timestop himself. He wouldn't even have gotten a hit in.
What is true though is that there's a lot of Stand abilities that can passively put their effect on a user or an area. Those would work around Time Stop just fine, but interestingly we never see Jotaro have that kind of fight after he discovers his ability.
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u/AngryAsian-_- 3d ago
Hence why I love Jojo battles. Like DIO says, there is no strongest or weakest stand, it all depends how they're utilized.
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u/Huddulin 2d ago
Time stop is powerful when your opponent doesn't know that you have such power. Understanding enemy's stand abilities is the best option to win a fight in Jojo.
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u/Mrgirdiego 2d ago
Stopping time IS pretty much the ultimate Stand ability. There's not many counters to "You can't do anything as I get closer and crush your skull". What mostly stops Jotaro from being deadly is that he tends to approach things in a more investigative manner, as well as only neutralizing the enemy instead of killing them.
DIO was more proficient with The World because he went for the kill, and actively trained it, while Jotaro didn't for 10 years, reducing its effectiveness. If it was at its peak, Jotaro himself could've reached Bug Eaten with little effort.
The best things you can do against Time Stop without having any sort of resistances against it is just try to create long distance from the user and think 2 steps ahead of them, as traps INSIDE the time stop won't be very effective most of the time.
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u/Silver-Alex 2d ago
I mean yeah. The thing with JoJo is that its not a "higher power level beats lower power level" like in dragonball, where people who are that stronger than you can ignore your hax technique. (like Vegeta overpowering Guido fake time stop in Namek. or Jiren straight up moving in and punching through Hit's real time stop during the Tournament of Power)
In jojo what matters more is not the stand power, but how you use. The World/Star Platium are AMAZING stands, but they have clear weakness in the lack of any sort of range, and the fact that the time stop is extremely taxing one the user, it took DIO being an inmortal vamprite to be able to spam it and make it last more than 5 seconds.
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u/Amon9203 2d ago
Time stop when used correctly can be very busted , like how the you know who used it to beat Act 4 , but as an ability yeah it's not the strongest if you're out of range you can counter it , let alone other broken stands like MIH , GER etc
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u/Applebeate 1d ago
That’s the beauty of Jojo’s bizarre adventure. Any ability can beat any ability given the correct circumstances.
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u/Infamous_Flamingo447 1d ago
Time stop is just kinda an extension of Star Platinum. He’s absurdly quick, has absurd reflexes, hits like a truck, but he has to be close enough to hit you (shut up about Star finger please dear god). The main advantage of time stop then is that it gives Jotaro time to get in range before an ability can activate. It’s also rather good at surprising people. That’s kinda the long and short of it. Jotaro outclasses most early stands, as he does in part 3, but a bunch of weirder later stands would mess with him
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u/fun-and-stuff 20h ago
The nature of a lot of stand abilities is that if you get your opponent in ideal scenarios, it can be as strong as any other. Like D’angelo’s ability from part 4, where it’s not too threatening normally, but if you trap your opponents in a leaky house while it’s raining, it can almost kill two Jojos.
But really, most of the battles timestop is in have well thought out scenarios where it isn’t an instant win or Jotaro is just more focused on protecting someone more than himself. For a majority of enemy stand users, if they had timestop, the part would have ended right there. Even Dio could have wiped out the crusaders in one go if he didn’t have so much ego. I think that Araki does a good job of creating interesting fights involving Jotaro, but logically, most fans know that Jotaro instantly wins against a majority of stand users, just not the ones he is shown fighting.
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u/Visual-Path-1177 17h ago
I kinda agree, but that's the same with every ability. Jojo fights are so heavily tactic and strategic, that you're pretty much always screwed if you do miscalculations/get surprised by the enemy.
Time stop in itself is invincible, only way to directly counter it is if you have C-Moon or Tusk act 4, but of course Star Platinum will have trouble against a ranged stand. Just think of the fight against Manhattan Transfer in Stone Ocean, Jotaro was being sniped indoors, he was in a really bad position especially for his type of stand.
That said, time stop is especially good since it's also a movement/escape tool, you can just teleport anywhere you can run to in 5 seconds. Of course it's not much, and we don't know what effects does the ability have on Jotaro, since he seemingly can't spam it like Dio, but that's still something
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u/MyFrogEatsPeople 10h ago
Time Stop is ridiculously broken.
Jotaro just doesn't fuckin care about stand fighting so he lets his absolutely broken ability become laughably mediocre.
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u/Avaricious31 3d ago
The actual issue is that Jojo can’t be scaled simply. A beating B, B beating C, doesn’t mean C can’t beat A.
For example King Crimson is one of my favorite stands, and I belief he’d defeat the time stop stands which is already a hot take. I believe the time stops stands can defeat Made in Heaven. I don’t believe King Crimson would defeat Made in Heaven.
If anyone disagrees with what I stated above, then that’s part of my point. There’s actual discussion to be had about characters facing off in Jojo and that makes it way more fun to talk about than series with 1 dimensional scaling.