Okay What the hell is Vlad ?

Because he has a medium play rate, below average to average win rate at all elos globally except Masters+ and weak early game.

As to what he is, he's a Blood Mage/Hemomancer as far as the lore goes. He's considered Vampiric thanks to his love for Blood.

In-Game, he's a Battle Mage that can wreck peoples shit if you put time into learning/mastering him. Like Karthus & Swain, Vlad can be kinda scary in teamfights since that's where he tends to create the most havoc.

He is fairly easy to counter unless they have much higher skill than you. Some tips go as follows:

1. His Q cooldown can be tracked via his 2nd bar. After the first cast the bar will fill to half and when it is half his Q is off cooldown. Then when he casts again prepare to use some long range aggressive tactics or back up a bit. He gains a small bit of speed when it hits full and his Q does extra damage and healing (more so to champs for the healing) so making him use the empowered Q on minions is going to be your best bet.

2. Try to play the sustain poke game. He will be generally saving his W pool for disengage, so dont try to unload your kit on him. Conserve mana where you can while poking him as well as you can.

3. His ulti tbh does not do a ton of damage unless you are squishy and he is fed. It is more about increasing the damage from his abilities than itself.... and if he hits multiple people he will heal a good portion even if it doesnt do a lot of damage. Your team should have spacing between them as they should anyways so that as few people are hit as possible.

4. You can see when he charges up his E, if you are playing someone like Heimerdinger or something that creates pets on command they can block the hit from him if you play around it. Otherwise, play around minions. It will make him waste his E and cause him to really damage himself. (His blood explosion can not go through targets).

5. Get a morello/executioners because vlad is not likely going to auto, so bramble is a bit useless. (Not first item, second or 3rd perhaps though).

A vampire

BLEH

he's OP

Vlad is not op so shhh

Vlad is susceptible to grievous wounds

His W has a really long cooldown, he's immobile, you can just walk away from his empowered Q, if you buy Grievous wounds or ignite him you remove a good chunk of use from his abilities, his E is blocked by minions...

As a melee you really just want to buy MR + hp then your Black Cleaver/Trinity, going into spirit visage then BC is good

Any advice is matchup dependent though, what do you play against Vlad?

I find you can bait his W Like a flash, then all in him. His damage is never insane for me as typically hexdrinker is all I need.

I mean late game vlad doing 3k damage in a matter of second is insane a bit no?

Gets tanky by building damage.

Gets damage by building tanky.

You just won a trade with him and oh, no, you didn´t because his HP bar is back to full while yours is still at half if not less.

Good design btw.

Why the fuck is he allowed to heal off of minions?

I have no early game so I must have a late game. Akali is worse and has more mobility and more sustain especially early