@Riot: Is there anything planned for Vladimir?

Because that dude is like the problem child of toplane. He is under no circumstances allowed to be good - and that for a good reason. Ah I remember back in the day when Vlad was a strong pick - and won toplane by default unless the enemy picked one of three specific counters.

On top of that he does not really fulfill his fantasy. Ya know, when you think about hemonancy or blood bending you imagine a little more than being a fancy mosquito that makes bad puns (although the puns are not the problem here).

So i tried to think about it a little. Just what is it in Vladimir's kit that causes the problems, both in gamneplay health and character fantasy? The sad answer: almost everything.

1.) The Q. Simple as that. Reliable, spammable, resourceless instant damage. While I know Vladimir should drain his victims of blood this might be the wrong way to put that into the game. There might be an alternative tho.

2.) The passive: it contributes literally nothing apart from forcing Vladimir into building certain items. Sure, it is not a big problem, but still not really working for Vladimir.

3.) The E. It just feels weird to use. It feels like Riot sat down while designing him and were like "ok we need still a spell that makes him use health somehow" and then they added this... thing. Also the AoE feels kind of out of place when your main gameplay is focussed aorund draining enemies with your single target Q.

4.) The ult. Just... too team reliant, too powerful in certain moments, but apart from that extremly underwhelming. I wonder where in Vladimir's character and lore one would get the feeling: Oh man, you know, that guy is a real team player! And since this tool can be so powerful it eats a lot of the power budget for Vlad. As I said with the Q, the idea of a blood-infection does not sound bad to me, but it's as well horribly executed.

Ok, but just how do we fix this when almost all we can keep in his kit is the iconic pool?

First of all: he might need a resource. Not mana of course, but a "blood pool". You know, the amount of blood he has aviable to cast abilities with, clearly visible as that floating ball of red he carries around. That resoruce system could count as his passive, is increased by HP and the regeneration is increased by HPreg.

But of course that is not the only way to fill the pool: whenever he drains an enemy the blood goes straight into the pool. The new Q would look like this: basic attacks "infect" enemies with blood. Using Q removes all "infection" stacks on an enemy and damages them based on the number of stacks they had on them.

Like this you could still drain enemies, had that blood infection theme going for you, but it wouldn't be the "instant damage" it is now.

That would be a way to adress at least one of the problems, for the others I sadly have no solution yet. Maybe if someone on the boars is smart enough to figure that out, please write it in this thread ^^