As a Vlad main, I was trying to come up with new 'healthy' designs for him that have a similar feel.

If you want a basic change to make him healthy but keep the rest of his gameplay, I'd do this.

Q:

Take away the flat heal on his Q. It needs to go, and its basically worthless anyway before you get , and that becomes the majority of your sustain until you get a lot of AP. The only valuable part of the heal on Q is the ratio.

The benefit of this change is lack of healing during early laning. In addition, it will make Vlad's early game more challenging in many currently 'less risky' match-ups, possibly allowing him to receive a buff to his late game so he can be a legitimate carry again.

In order to move away from his laning pattern, which was deemed unhealthy, you can attach that heal ratio on Q to something else, such as Vlad's level or his ult level. Maybe even W!

However, if you want to rework him to make him more interesting, here's how I'd do it. I had 4 goals to start out.:

• Introduce a healthy design for Vlad that can be both highly punishing and highly rewarding for the player depending on good or bad play. Essentially, make Vlad's 'stat-check' nature far less consistent, but in the hands of the player. Currently, opponents get consistently and painfully punished in fights just for being anywhere near Vlad, even if he's just focusing on a single target. He's basically just a beefy damage threat because blood.

• Create a champion with unique interaction with spellvamp. Vlad already holds the stat hostage, so why not at least make it interesting?

• Make his gameplay more interactive and less geared towards split-pushing. His current design makes him a godlike split-pusher and team-fighter with minimal effort overall.

• Revisit his original theme, which was somebody that can both empower himself or his attacks with blood.

VALUES DEFINITELY ARE NOT FINAL. THEY GIVE A RELATIVE IDEA OF HOW THINGS SHOULD FUNCTION.

Passive:

Vlad's Q is empowered by his current spellvamp. This includes and effects, adding 15% spellvamp and 20% of current spellvamp, respectively.

Vlad no longer benefits directly from spellvamp.

Q:

Passive: Modify's Vlad's auto-attacks to act as an ability as far as spellshields and dodge are concerned. All damage dealt is magic damage, including crits and on-hit effects. His base AD determines the base damage of the first component.

There are two modes to toggle between.

Ensanguinate: Vladimir injects his target with vile blood (single target point-and-click) deal 1.0 base AD ( +.15/.20/.25/.30/.35 AP) Magic Damage. Each attack costs 0/2/4/6/8% current HP Lose up to 0/20/30/40/50% attack speed based on max health

Essentially a non-instantaneous version of his Q, but has potential for a little AD in the builds, considering auto-attacks. The goal of this is to make it so early on its still usable as a farming tool without being punishing as harass. The attack speed penalty is to prevent its overall DPS from being buffed from this change too much. We want its effective 'cooldown' to normally be similar to old Q, but have the potential to be a stronger DPS tool if focused over sustain component of new Q, since the old E is being changed. As his DPS increases, the risk of him having too little health increases drastically.

Exsanguinate: Vladimir siphons blood from enemies in the target area (think karthus Q, but the delay is his auto animation; likely a modified version of his current Q animation for this portion) dealing (.35 AP) magic damage and healing him based on his current spellvamp total (as normal) per target hit, as well as very small scaling based on missing HP) The size of the AoE is based on your current spellvamp. It can modify either radius (giving it a soft cap on size) or Diameter (scaling directly with spellvamp value). Heal is 25% effective on minions.

Attack speed is set to .600, but attack speed increases projectile speed, return speed, and decreases animation time.

The AoE starts extremely small. We want him to have a relatively hard time early on, especially with lane control. The speed of the projectile scaling with attack speed makes it so that, in lane, anyone and everyone can dodge it as harass, but if they engage on him, he has a tool to not just roll over dead.

W:

Push his old passive to his W and have it scale with ranks, up to its current value (as an effective gold multiplier) at level 5. Do something with that pitiful HP->AP ratio. Balance the two out, even if you have to lower the bonus HP provided by the currently good half. In addition (here's the crazy part) Add a small base AD->HP ratio. This is not to push him towards being an ADC. This is to create more interesting interactions between spellvamp items now and in the future, as well as naturally making sense with his new Q.

** This would make him much squishier early-mid game if he wants to deal damage and give incentive to level W earlier, creating more real choices for Vlad, especially when he loses lane. In addition, it would make him less snowbally if he gets a lead in lane due to slightly lower ap and drastically lower health, which should be the case for any carry.**

E:

If his passive is changed to interact with spellvamp and his Q, specifically, E would likely need some changes as well, as there's a lot of room for it to interact with the passive as well. You could even make it somewhat like Morphling in DotA, where he either gradually loses max hp in exchange for AP or toggles it to gradually gain max HP, but lose AP.

This would provide some really interesting interactions with his remade old passive being attached to W.

The benefit to this system is as follows: Due to his 'new' passive interacting with spellvamp to provide sustain via Exsanguinate only, if he toggles E for damage at max health, he's literally hurting himself because he's likely to be near full hp, and his sustain won't mitigate that at all. When he takes significant damage he can safely increase his damage at effectively no loss, but introduces the possibility of over-healing or potentially becoming too squishy and mitigating the best-case use of his sustain.

If he toggles E for HP, all he does is gain max HP in exchange for lowering his damage. His current health does not change, and the more max HP he has, the less damage he has behind his Q to fill it up quickly.

The toggle has no CD, and can be used while under crowd control effects, as to prevent it from hurting him too much if he gets stunned (but who knows, this might be an interesting form of specific counterplay CC can actually provide against him)

Effectively, every point of AP has an equal (in cost) value of HP given or taken away. A minimum HP may or may not be set. The trolling argument doesn't fit here, because if somebody wants to die, they're going to die, regardless of max HP.

Leveling E increases the exchange rate, and can offer a minimum HP if so desired (but this can make it too easy to sit at near-optimal amounts. I'd highly recommend not adding a minimum)

R could be the same, but I think there's better thematic space than aoe damage increase for his team. Maybe something to help him get around fights better or chase?

TL;DR: Was bored and tried to come up with interesting Vlad design. Terrible ideas all around! Feel free to comment. Again, values are definitely not set, they're just there for an idea.