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Vlad struggles are more of a gameplay issue than a raw numbers problem.

Sir Chasm·5/6/2016, 12:28:08 PM·15 votes·1,068 views

The upcoming hotfix makes it pretty clear that Vlad's recent update has left him feeling weakish. There have also been examples of him dominating in certain situations, which leads to the dilemma of how to fix his performance issues without giving him even more power where he is already succeeding. Various suggestions have been made, from numbers tweaks to casting animation removal to further reworks, but the root of the problem seems to be inherent in the new timing mechanics and how they interact with the rest of his kit.

Vlad is now reliant on utilizing relatively short windows of opportunity to engage successfully. Unfortunately the nature of the timing involved telegraphs these windows to his opponent, and he lacks the means to force an engagement if his opponent simply avoids him during those windows. From a pure numbers standpoint, if you know how Vlad works, and your opponent doesn't, it's pretty easy to steamroll your way to victory. If, however your opponent understands your kit, they will out trade your two weak Qs, farm or harrass for 5-9 seconds while it CDs, and then avoid you for the short window your empowered Q is available. Attempt to charge your E to even the trade at any point in this process and they will simply back away or CC, leaving you to damage yourself and push the wave, and possibly get some free hits in.

Another timing issue becomes more prevalent in team fights. On paper, Vlad has incredible sustain potential. Unfortunately, with the charge up requirement for his empowered Q, and the delayed healing from his ult, odds are if you really need the sustain you'll be dead before you get it.

Time will tell how far the upcoming numbers tweaks go towards fixing the issue, but it seems the problem is more complex than a simple lack of damage.

Ideas that might be more helpful than just OMG MOAR DAMAGE pl0x:

  1. Increase empowered Q uptime. In addition to the obvious benefit of giving Vlad more time to do his thing, this places more strategic importance on the opponents decision to avoid him, effectively zoning themselves out for a more meaningful length of time.

  2. Increasing the duration/power of the speed buff. If your opponent is paying attention to your timing, they can start backing off before the buff even procs. A better speed buff would give a better chance of closing the gap, again forcing your opponent to make a more meaningful retreat if they opt for avoidance.

  3. Frontloading a portion of the heal on his ult. Better sustain in teamfights while you wait for that empowered Q -Half immediately half on explosion. -Heal-over-time for the duration -damage based drain a la Hecarim

  4. Reduced visibilty for his E. Have it fade in as it charges, giving a better chance to catch them unaware. Not a huge difference on its own, as the charge happens fairly quickly, but arguably useful as a package component with other minor tweaks.

  5. Some type of benefit for Vlad if his opponent opts to avoid his empowered Q. Something with more strategic value than simply wasting it on a minion. -Refund a stack -Combine with one of the other suggestions and increase the duration/speed of the next empowered Q

In short, Vlad in his current state is just too easy to counterplay.

17 Comments

JESUSSAYSNO5/7/2016, 12:19:20 AM4 votes

Issues with Vlad from a Vlad main: -Crimson rush is a straight across nerf from his previous Q by having the EXACT same average damage and healing per 3 Q casts as his old Q, with half of the damage and healing gated behind the Rush window. Also, the cooldown is a second longer at max rank. His old Q wasn't an issue, even with spellvamp in the patch before the update. -Crimson rush is too telegraphed and the durration too short -Overall healing per second is down over 75% between the removal of Q consistency, E regen buff, and removal of viable spellvamp itimization. -E's health cost is up to 6 times higher than pre-rework E -E costs forcing Vlad into a full tank build to mitigate all external damage, as the cost is so high, without resists, we melt from taking self damage from E -E does more self damage than enemy damage after resistances are calculated -E slows us while trying to line up a skillshot -E's enemy slow makes Rylai's, the most slot efficient item for vlad, rarely worth getting -E's overall dps is lower than our last E -E's damage is 100% mitigated through standing behind something else -E's telegraph exists, sound and visual effects are more than enough. Does any other mage need a range indicator on their spells?

As far as I can see it, the best sollution to fix Vlad would be to average out the Q a bit more between lesser and empowered transfusions and give us the old CD. It doesn't need to be huge, and I'm fine with some gating behind the third cast, but basic Q casts are so weak right now it's not even remotely fun to play as. This levels our our HPS, making spamming E less suicidal. 2.5 seconds is also realllly short for a window that's a large chunk of our damage with the spell. Our sustain in raw numbers is still too low after evening it out. I would flat add the old WoTA spellvamp as a passive somewhere on his kit that scales with level, either an on level scaling on his passive, or a 5% per rank on his ult. All of old Vlad's sustain was balanced around that 15% before resists spellvamp. Riot's increased our healthcosts 5fold+ and made our base sustain weaker and less consistent, so all in all, we're literally just at a massive health net loss.

His E is a hot mess of a spell. Remove range indicators. Penetrate through first target, dealing scaling % of damage per rank (10%/20%/30%/40%/50%) on all secondary targets on each skillshot. Remove self and enemy slow. The damage on this spell is perfect

KEEP EVERYTHING ELSE THE SAME! Honestly, our primary issue is that our Q is too spiky and the window of the spike is too small, our healing is too low, our health costs are too high, and E feels like fucking shit to play with.

dasmaschine235/6/2016, 8:22:26 PM2 votes

As someone who primarily played vlad I think the new rework really has this champion struggling for a number of reasons. The least of which I think is he has been very misunderstood.

First he was often described as a tank/mage. Which is simply not true and a not a good indicator as to the playstyle that he lends himself to. Vlad's abilities by themselves are not generally 'tanky' or lend themselves to him sustaining lots of damage. Nor does he have any peel. On the contrary, his best defensive ability actually makes him untargettable.

A better description of vladimir is as a sustain mage. Clearly he accomplishes this through his 'q', and to a lesser extent his 'w'. However, often overlooked is the fact that being a mana-less champ, his ability to spam abilities endlessly and continually syphon health back made him the best sustain in the game. (That was also his weakness as interrupts have a devastating effect on him).

Itemization:

  1. Will of the ancients was essential to vlad for good reason. It gave him some health recovery for all abilities and increased his q to the point it could make up for any of his own sacrificed health. Removing this item alone would have made it more challenging to play vlad.

  2. The new 'e' is potentially his most damaging ability. However this appears to scale better with higher health. Vlad's passive doesn't grant him a significant boost to ap when building high health. This is partly why AP/Health items tended to balance him out better historically. Purely health items would leave his damage lacking.

  3. With the lack of will of the ancients, the spirit visage is almost essential now. Unfortunately it should have always been a situational item for vlad as it really gives him little offensive ability. In vlads case, his offense WAS his defense. Now he is forced to buy an item that affords him no damage scaling to improve the heal from his q.

Abilities:

  1. Ult damage lowered and it's debuff nerfed. This actually isn't a huge nerf as the ultimate isn't want necessarily made vlad a strong champion.

  2. q's mechanics are awkward at best. First you have to use it once to build a charge to empower it, then use it a second time to activate it.. after a nasty broadcast and only .5 seconds to use it a THIRD time to get the actual full benefit of q. I get that they are trying to make him interesting, but see early points about cdr on vlad. I'm now having to broadcast my itent over the course of 3 casts and rush in to get the full benefit of what was once the primary ability. Usually this just gets wasted on a minion trying to keep vlad's health up.

  3. e's mechanics are interesting but it is Highly broadcast again.. it slows me down?? what? And then to use it effectively i have to wait 2.5 seconds.. essentially adding another 2.5 seconds to vlad's base cdr for the ability and making it pretty easy for anyone to escape (nevermind being behind something). Because E seems to be the most damaging ability now and scales off of health, vlad players have a tough choice which is to stack health and leave other abilities without any 'bite' or to lean toward ap and leave 'E' without any. Additionally it costs 10% of his health?

  4. another interesting aspect is the slow from e. Nice touch except that since vlad is also slowed and broadcasting it is difficult to land and somewhat redundant with an item that should probably always be in his kit now (rylais'). The irony of course is that with an added slow ability and carrying this item, he is much less likely now to actually successfully land a spell and slow someone than before.

In summary, it feels rather like the new design is to push vlad into a 'tankier' feel by building more health but because he was never a good 'tank' all that they succeeded in doing was to take his fangs out. :)

runedara5/6/2016, 8:31:23 PM2 votes

I don't play vlad much anymore but his e didn't seem that good. I think they should change it so 2 volleys happen in .25 sec. So you can still dodge some of the damage but can't have a 1 health minion block it all.

Over Innsmouth5/7/2016, 3:29:13 PM2 votes

I personally adore new Vlad, but there's two changes I wish I could add.

  1. As you rank Q up, the healing reduction against minions scales down to 0.

  2. If you fully charge E it goes through all units in range OR E normally goes through Champions at all times, but not minions.

MunchCrunchLunch5/7/2016, 1:16:04 AM2 votes

it doesn't really make sense why his E range is shown to enemies.. I dont really play vlad but again. nonsense

WitchQueen Annie5/7/2016, 1:58:43 AM2 votes

Too much counterplay (making more than half his damage on paper useless and unusable when it matters).

E is too telegraphed to the enemy (and the extra self-slow on full charge is unnecessary).

I also support the idea that the damage should be more averaged out between the three Qs (having it all on the empowered Qs make him too easy to counterplay), either that and/or increase the speed movement boost on the Crimson Rush and its duration.

If you want R to be more meaningful, consider increasing the damage amp to the old 12%; it feels lacklustre compared to other game-changing Ultimates

tXQbsPrjN55/7/2016, 9:17:22 AM1 votes

Raw numbers issue is just buzz for we totally didn't fuck up our new ideas are good you ppl are just stupid.

Yeah why don't you just have Vlad do 100% hp damage to himself when he E's and whoever he hits takes 100% true damage. There I fixed your raw numbers issue. So stupid.

AttackOnTeemos5/6/2016, 1:13:23 PM1 votes

Vlad's one of those champions you just wanted to light on fire and put out with more gasoline. He's always been that one champ who could literally trade with someone and still poke away at their life and gain life back. They just added better counter play against him imo. Personally, this is league of legends about 90% of everyone are NOT going to read the full patch changes play in rank and don't have a clue what the new vlad rework will even do. Even if they do another 60% of them are going to wait until he is played in LCS and try to mimic some ungodly like play and resort him being perma banned or fail really hard trying to do it.

My Waifu Vanilla5/7/2016, 3:30:13 AM1 votes

I always figured for his ult they should just (instead of the healing it gives now) increase everyone's damage by the 10% but also give everyone 10% omni-vamp during its duration (and then also apply that vamp to the pop effect for Vlad himself). Yeah, it could be a lot to ask for, but only 3 champions are really benefitting from the ult anyway (support and your tank typically don't care regardless) and it makes it not feel so bad if they die before your ult pops (or live afterwards making it "wasted" in either case).

dasmaschine235/6/2016, 8:59:37 PM1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Sir Chasm,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=OYFaVAta,comment-id=,timestamp=2016-05-06T12:28:08.321+0000)

  1. Increase empowered Q uptime. In addition to the obvious benefit of giving Vlad more time to do his thing, this places more strategic importance on the opponents decision to avoid him, effectively zoning themselves out for a more meaningful length of time.
  • What if instead of it cooling off, every 3rd q was simply 'empowered'?
  1. Frontloading a portion of the heal on his ult. Better sustain in teamfights while you wait for that empowered Q -Half immediately half on explosion. -Heal-over-time for the duration -damage based drain a la Hecarim
  • Agree the ult heal is largely not helpful in its present state. Most fights are usually decided by the time his ult explodes.
  1. Reduced visibilty for his E. Have it fade in as it charges, giving a better chance to catch them unaware. Not a huge difference on its own, as the charge happens fairly quickly, but arguably useful as a package component with other minor tweaks.
  • What if they removed the self slow too?
Blazing Tenshi5/6/2016, 4:26:04 PM1 votes

Plz no.