The Best Build in Every Division, and Why Heavyweight Is a Trap
331 fighters · 8 divisions · 3,000 careers per build-and-opponent pairing · seed 2025
By Haaris A · Published October 13, 2026 · 8 min read · How we work
The short version
Heavyweight has the best build in the game, and the division you should fight in is not heavyweight. If you could pick any eight fighters from a single division, heavyweight would give you a build averaging 97, flyweight only 91.6, and the other six sit in between. But a build’s ceiling is not what wins a career. The same heavyweight ceiling build goes undefeated in 12.13% of careers against heavyweight opponents and 25.73% against bantamweights. You choose your career division after the draft, and that choice is worth more than anything you drafted.
Two other results frame everything below. The 95% win-probability cap means even a flawless build can finish 25-0 only about 27.74% of the time, so past a certain point extra rating buys almost nothing. And the simulator does not weight the eight attributes equally, which changes which fighters belong in a ceiling build.
How a “best build” is defined here
Each attribute’s true value to the career is not the same. The simulator’s win rating is the plain average of your eight attributes, plus a Fight IQ bonus of 0.08 rating points per point of IQ, minus a late-career cardio penalty that costs the equivalent of about 0.018 points per cardio point on average across a full career. Fight IQ is therefore worth roughly 64% more than any other attribute, and cardio about 14% more. We searched every combination of eight different fighters, one per slot, at their peak ratings, using those real weights, and kept the best. That is a ceiling, not a plan: you cannot choose who appears on a wheel. It is the number to measure your draft against.
The ceiling build for every division
| Division | Build average | Fight IQ | Cardio | Strength | Weakest slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavyweight | 97 | Jon Jones 99 | Cain Velasquez 96 | Brock Lesnar 98 | Kickboxing 95 |
| Welterweight | 95.9 | Georges St-Pierre 99 | Colby Covington 99 | Kamaru Usman 93 | Durability 92 |
| Middleweight | 95.8 | Anderson Silva 98 | Sean Strickland 95 | Yoel Romero 95 | Boxing 92 |
| Lightweight | 95.5 | Islam Makhachev 96 | Frankie Edgar 98 | Gleison Tibau 88 | Strength 88 |
| Featherweight | 95 | Alexander Volkanovski 97 | Frankie Edgar 98 | Josh Emmett 88 | Strength 88 |
| Light Heavyweight | 94.6 | Jon Jones 99 | Corey Anderson 92 | Anthony Johnson 93 | Boxing 92 |
| Bantamweight | 93.8 | Dominick Cruz 98 | Merab Dvalishvili 99 | Song Yadong 78 | Strength 78 |
| Flyweight | 91.6 | Demetrious Johnson 99 | Brandon Moreno 94 | Deiveson Figueiredo 78 | Strength 78 |
Peak ratings, eight different fighters from one division, one per attribute, weighted by what the simulator pays for each attribute.
The pattern is strength. Heavyweight has 22 fighters with a 90 or better in strength; light heavyweight has 7, middleweight 6, welterweight 4, and the four lightest divisions have none. A heavyweight build gets Brock Lesnar’s 98 for strength; the best a lightweight or featherweight build can do is an 88, and bantamweight and flyweight top out at 78. That single column explains most of the gap between 97 and 91.6. Take strength out and the divisions are separated by a point or two.
The Fight IQ column is where fighters you can link to earn their place. Jon Jones at 99 anchors both heavyweight and light heavyweight, Georges St-Pierre at 99 anchors welterweight and Demetrious Johnson at 99 anchors flyweight, a division whose ceiling would otherwise be dismal. Because IQ carries the largest weight, the best single pick in any division is almost always its highest-IQ fighter. The practical rule is simple: if the board shows an IQ in the high 90s, take it before anything else that is not a 98-plus in a scarce slot.
Division by division
Heavyweight (97). Dominated by its physical edge. Brock Lesnar gives 98 strength, Fabricio Werdum a 98 in BJJ, Daniel Cormier a 98 in wrestling and Mark Hunt a 95 chin. It has more individual attribute ratings of 90 or higher (81) than any other division, nearly three times flyweight’s 28. The weakness is that its own opponent pool is the most dangerous one to fight.
Middleweight and welterweight (95.8 and 95.9). The most balanced divisions. Both can field a 98 in wrestling (Khamzat Chimaev) and a 97 or 98 in BJJ, and welterweight’s Colby Covington supplies a 99 for cardio. Middleweight pairs a 98 in kickboxing, from Israel Adesanya, with a 98 in Fight IQ, from Anderson Silva.
Lightweight and featherweight (95.5 and 95.0). Elite everywhere except strength, where an 88 is the best available. Lightweight’s Charles Oliveira and Khabib Nurmagomedov give a 99 in BJJ and a 99 in wrestling in the same build, the highest grappling pair any single division can field.
Light heavyweight, bantamweight, flyweight (94.6, 93.8, 91.6). The thinnest top ends. Flyweight has no boxing or kickboxing rating at 90 or higher at all, and its best strength is a 78. A flyweight-only draft cannot reach the heavyweight ceiling, and no amount of skill changes that.
The result that matters: where the build fights
We ran each ceiling build through 3,000 careers against each of the eight opponent pools. The table is the percentage that finished with no losses.
| Build \ fights in | HW | LHW | MW | WW | LW | FW | BW | FLW |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavyweight ceiling | 12.13% | 15.5% | 25% | 13.1% | 14.83% | 18.37% | 25.73% | 24.57% |
| Light Heavyweight ceiling | 3.73% | 6.03% | 10.93% | 4.6% | 4.97% | 8.27% | 9.43% | 17.77% |
| Middleweight ceiling | 6.67% | 9.77% | 17.07% | 8.4% | 8.93% | 11.43% | 16.87% | 23% |
| Welterweight ceiling | 7.5% | 11.63% | 20.1% | 9.33% | 9.4% | 12.27% | 18.43% | 20.27% |
| Lightweight ceiling | 5.73% | 9.43% | 15.77% | 7.83% | 7.4% | 10.6% | 15.53% | 19% |
| Featherweight ceiling | 4.27% | 7.67% | 13.5% | 5.17% | 5.57% | 8.73% | 11.93% | 18.1% |
| Bantamweight ceiling | 2.43% | 4.87% | 7.33% | 2.63% | 2.57% | 5.37% | 7.23% | 14.57% |
| Flyweight ceiling | 0.57% | 0.73% | 1.6% | 0.73% | 0.43% | 1.5% | 1.37% | 4.8% |
| Best of all 331 | 17.13% | 19.2% | 27.43% | 16.83% | 20.63% | 22.43% | 28.27% | 26.2% |
Share of 3,000 simulated careers per cell that finished with zero losses. The theoretical limit with every fight at the 95% cap is 27.74%.
Read across any row. Every build is far more likely to go 25-0 against bantamweights, middleweights and flyweights than against heavyweights, lightweights or welterweights. The reason is the matchmaking rule: the simulator aims for an opponent near a rising target rating, climbing to 88 for title fights and as high as 92, and a division can only supply opponents it actually has. The cleanest predictor is how deep each pool runs at the top.
| Division | Entries | Average | Rated 88+ | Rated 90+ | Best |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lightweight | 46 | 84.3 | 11 | 4 | 92 |
| Welterweight | 48 | 83.5 | 7 | 4 | 93 |
| Heavyweight | 40 | 83 | 8 | 4 | 94 |
| Featherweight | 38 | 82.1 | 6 | 3 | 92 |
| Light Heavyweight | 40 | 83.7 | 6 | 2 | 94 |
| Flyweight | 39 | 80.4 | 2 | 1 | 90 |
| Bantamweight | 36 | 82.6 | 5 | 0 | 88 |
| Middleweight | 44 | 82 | 5 | 0 | 89 |
Rating = the simulator's overall for an opponent: the mean of the fighter's eight attributes in their best edition, rounded to a whole number. Sorted by fighters at 90 or higher on this rating, then by average.
This table counts by the simulator’s overall, not by the Overall printed on a fighter’s card. The reason is that matchmaking compares the target with exactly this number: each opponent enters the pool as the rounded mean of their eight attributes. The card Overall is an editorial rating. It can differ from a simple average of the attributes, and it runs higher. Across the dataset 55 cards show a card Overall of 90 or more, but only 18 fighters reach 90 on the simulator’s number, the rounded average of their eight attributes, so counting cards would overstate how many late-career threats a division can actually supply. The rounding matters too: a fighter averaging 89.5 enters the pool as a 90.
Lightweight, welterweight and heavyweight share the lead with 4 fighters each at 90 or higher on the simulator’s number, and bantamweight and middleweight have none; their best sit at 88 and 89. Where the pool can field a 90, the late-career schedule is full of them. Where it cannot, the simulator falls back on the closest names it has. A division near the bottom of the table is not one to avoid when drafting, though: its spins cap out lower, but the gap between its best and its typical fighter is smaller, so the pick you get is more predictable.
The best build you can draft is 98.1, and it reaches 28.27% against bantamweights, almost exactly the cap. Against heavyweights it manages 17.13%.
For a realistic build, not a ceiling one, the effect is bigger. In a separate test of 500 typical drafts, each run 20 times, the flyweight pool produced 25-0 careers 9.4% of the time and the heavyweight pool 1.3%. That is the matchmaking curve at work, as our guide to late-career losses shows, and it is the single most valuable decision in the game.
What to do with this
Stop at 95. A build of flat 90s almost never went undefeated in welterweight; a flat 95 reached 5.1%. Those five points are worth chasing. But the distance from the best heavyweight ceiling to the best build in the entire dataset is about one rating point, and it moved the middleweight number from 25% to 27.43%. The cap flattens everything above it.
Draft strength like it is the rarest thing on the wheel, because it is. Nobody lighter than welterweight has a 90 to give you. If a heavyweight wheel shows a 93-plus in strength, take it. Outside heavyweight only Yoel Romero (95), Anthony Johnson (94), Paulo Costa, Alex Pereira and Kamaru Usman (93 each) reach that number. The full strength leaderboard is in our best fighters by attribute guide.
Choose flyweight, bantamweight or middleweight for the career. That advice survives every build we tested. The only exception is the single most unrealistic one, a ceiling build facing a ceiling opponent, and even there the difference between divisions is a matter of a few percentage points rather than a factor of seven.