Dio Brando/Abilities and Powers

Personal
Intelligence: Dio is naturally intelligent; manifesting between cunning, perceptiveness, comprehension and/or foresight.

Toughness: All prior to becoming a Vampire, Dio was already an able bare-handed fighter; which skill he says he developed in the slums of London. A good amateur sportsman, during a rugby game as a young adult, he is shown to have developed high athletic ability (as well as fantastic muscle mass).

Charisma: Dio is a cunning, charming and intelligent individual. In addition to Stand users, whom Avdol and Joseph suggest he recruits through sheer charm or charisma, he has charmed many women through his life.

Knowledge: Throughout both his humble youth and tempestuous maturity, Dio is often seen reading. Also during his youth, he is seen playing chess with adults. In Part VI, in conversation with Enrico Pucci, he is shown to have accumulated some wisdom within the world of Stands. Importantly, Dio is able to concoct a plan, contained in his diary, incorporating vast, unknown information as to the deliberate creation of Stands of perfectly specific abilities.

Vampiric
Becoming a Vampire as a young adult, Dio displays a broad range of fantastic, supernatural abilities; explained as expressions of the full potential of the human body.

Inhuman Strength: Dio attains massive strength as a Vampire, allowing him feats such as forcibly walking on walls and single-handedly deflecting attacks such as Hierophant Green's Emerald Splash. After absorbing Joseph's blood he is powerful enough to drop a steamroller on Jotaro.

Enhanced Senses: Demonstrated when placing his head on the ground to hear Jotaro's heartbeat, Dio appears to have senses beyond human level.

Regeneration: Dio can regenerate his body faster than fire can consume it. His incredible vitality is maintained by consuming human beings (or their blood), which he commonly does by piercing them with his fingers. Like all JoJo vampires, Dio sucks blood through tentacles in his fingers and has been seen at least once drinking blood from an unnamed girl. His body is able to live even after having vital body parts amputated and he can also control his detached body parts.

Space Ripper Stingy Eyes: Dio is able to pressurize liquid in his eyeballs and then create small openings in his pupils, eventually creating two fluid jets (referred to by Straizo as "Space Ripper Stingy Eyes" ) powerful enough to slice stone.

Vaporization Freezing Technique (気化冷凍法): A freezing ability enabling Dio to freeze his own body parts and transfer this over to other objects or beings. It is able to cancel out the Hamon by freezing the blood in the user's body.

Fusion: By fusing different species, Dio can create half-man half-beast creatures. He can even fuse himself with another living beings to take control of them.

Spores (肉の芽): In Part I: Phantom Blood, Dio's powers are more bio-organic, but for the most part in Part III he only utilizes the "evil implants" - a parasite that brainwashes Polnareff and Kakyoin. A vampires cells can spawn Evil Implants generated from hair and insert it in the brains of living beings to control them. If someone tries to take out the spore, it will grow tentacles in a attempt to kill both the host and the one trying to remove it. If the vampire wants, he can give permission to someone to activate the spore's tentacles anytime he wants if close to it. The spores possess another effect in case DIO himself ever dies. According Keicho Nijimura, his father who was implanted by the spore underwent a mutation into a greenish animalistic form by having DIO's cells inside his body. Presumably, this is a side effect that the rest of the surviving Stand users that DIO that had implanted inside them would suffer from.

Hypnosis: This ability was used twice on Jack The Ripper and Poco respectively. In the case of the former, Dio hypnotized Jack to convince him to join as a servant, allowing Dio to drain his blood and turn him into a zombie. Poco was manipulated to lure Jonathan into a trap, though his consciousness returned after being subjected to Jonathan's hamon.

Teleportation: Dio also shows the ability to disappear by fading into darkness, though this may have been a result of the use of his Stand (see below).

Weaknesses
All of this, however, is at the expense of having a body sustained by sheer willpower alone, rather than vital energy. A sufficiently powerful vital force - specifically, sunlight or the Hamon force - will negate the sustaining force's presence and disintegrate the long-unliving body.

Stand
Dio's humanoid Stand is The World; facilitating melee attack roughly equal in its immense force and speed to Jotaro's Star Platinum.

About a year after gaining his Stand, Dio discovered that it is capable of stopping time. At first, he could only do this for a very short amount of time but, by the end of Part III, he is able to stop time for a maximum of 9 seconds. This duration would have continued to develop had Dio not been defeated. When stopping time, Dio gives the impression that he is teleporting or moving at impossible speed.

The ability is best known for Dio's activation and cancellation phrases THE WORLD, Time, stop! (! 時よ止まれ!) and Time resumes. (時は動き出す).

Joestar Stand Abilities
Due to the familiar connection between Jonathan's body and Jonathan's descendants, it seems that The World shares abilities with the Stands of the Joestar family. This is hinted when Dio was shown able to create a vision on a photograph, similar to Joseph's Hermit purple and this could explain why Star Platinum is also able to stop time as eventually discovered by Jotaro during the grand battle between him and Dio.

Still due to this connection, Dio is also able to sense the presence of other Joestars. He was even able to tell when Joseph used Hermit Purple to take a psychic photograph of him, as well as instinctively know that his acquisition of a Stand also awoke stand abilities in Jonathan's descendants. He also had control over Jonathan's Stand, which allowed him to create psychic images, be it on photographs or crystal balls. This increased his charisma with people, as it made them even more aware about how superior Dio was.

In Video Games

 * Blazing Fists (MudaMuda)
 * Blazing Strike
 * The World, Road Roller
 * Eye-Crushing Kick
 * The World, Circle of Knives
 * The World, Time Stop
 * The Touch of Evil (Charisma)
 * Referring to his "Evil Implants"