Quintessential Vladimir guide for season 11

 
Well hello there wonderful people. My name is Calvin and I stream under the name Elite500, as the title suggests, I’ve been challenger for 4 seasons now and ended it since the last 2.
 
I’ve played vlad throughout every meta, no matter how rough or how much the playstyle has changed, and I’m finally here, bringing to YOU the absolute ULTIMATE, QUINTESSENTIAL, HOLY guide, everything you will ever need for season 11. At the time of writing this guide I’ve played around 500 preseason games and half of them in high challenger.
 
Why play Vladimir? Doesn’t he actually suck? Isn’t he noobchamp?
 
Do you wish to experience the pleasure of entering teamfights and leaving them higher hp?
 
Do you want to dehumanise yourself to and not even recognise your fellow teammates as sentient meat lumps? Can you handle the responsibility to take every game post 20 minutes as your responsibility?
Of course you do.
 
 

Table of contents:

1. Setups: we’ll go over the main 2 setups including items, runes, summoners, and build
2. How to choose between the two setups and which play-style suits you best
3. Early laningphase and how to play matchups
4. Every matchup in the game including recommended setups for matchups
5. Unleashing unholy wrath upon your foes in mid to lategame
6. Combos
7. Skin choice

 

Setup one, the way of the gigalord:

Back in season 7 the chad vladimir players received an upgrade from thunderlords decree, electrocute, termed GIGALORDS back then, it’s power has been dormant and ever waiting since the nerfs of 2018.
 
This path is more optimally suited for those who wish to have devastating all in damage, those who wish to win lane as early as level 3, those who want to annihilate and leave them with .no counterplay 100-0s
 
This setup is best suited and optimally played against melee champions such as Sylas, Pantheon, Yone, Yasuo, Ekko, Akali, Kata, etc.
 

Summoner spells:

Ignite and flash are a must take with this setup, allowing you to deliver sudden oneshots with flash and having beyond unholy all in damage with ignite. Ignite also helps us with nimbus cloak and with procing electro.
 

Runes

Keystone:

Of course you’ll be taking electrocute as your keystone, it allows you to win a lot of trades early into the game, it’s easily proccable early with auto Q auto or auto E Q or even auto ignite Q.
The trading is nice although the main reason you take this keystone is for the HEINOUS all in damage it can do, most champions can literally be 100-0 oneshot at level 6 if they’re not innately invulnerable (looking at you galio).
 

Minor runes, domination:

Taste of blood is absolutely amazing and helps out in every melee matchup, feel free to swap this to sudden impact if you’re deranged and play this setup into ranged opponents. (sudden impact proccable with rocketbelt.
 
Poro ward is extremely consistent and can be stacked easily to grant you free 4 ap level 3 and 30 ap at around ~ 16 – 18 minutes depending on how actively you ward and where.
 
Ravenous hunter synergises so well with vlads huge point and click Q damage, easily accumulating 10’000 HP healed in a game. While it doesn’t sound like much, since the rune was changed from spellvamp to omnivamp it now will even heal you slightly on autohits even without stacks helping you outsustain early. Some crazy gamer chinese vlads will take ultimate hunter since their server is perma fighting, it’s also a viable choice but feels worse to me.

Secondary runes, sorcery:

For sure my favourite secondary tree to spec into, although this one is a lot more preference, I think all trees are balanced it’s just more playstyle, you flash like a maniac? Go inspiration cosmic insight with cdr shoes rush and enjoy less than 4 minute flash cooldown etc.
Transcendence holy MOLY this rune got such a nice change in season 11, 5 ability haste at level 5? Sign me the hell up. The ability cd refund is also amazing on vladimirs W since it’s basecooldown is like 30 seconds, allowing you sometimes to pool twice in fights.
 
Nimbus Cloak to make up for the lack of mobility before rocketbelt nimbus cloak helps out so much allowing you to kite and rundown pesky season 10 dashy champs with ease. Optionally gathering storm is also nice but with this rune setup you mostly play for early mid domination and nimbus is also great lategame. My games have been decided 1000x more by having more mobility in clutch scenarios than having 40 extra ap at 30 minutes.
For the mini runes always Ability haste, AP, and scaling hp
 

Build:

You best be prepared to build mejais.
 

Starting item:

Your starting item should be dark seal refillable every game, the dark seal buff now giving hp and 5 extra ap is absurdly good for vlad, random lucky early kills giving 10 ap is also beyond bonkers. Shaving off 350g on your mejais purchase is also essential.
 

First mythic:

Hextech Rocketbelt is by far the best mythic you can go in every game currently, amazing active, amazing components, amazing mythic passive, it’s just THAT good. The dash and ms is a great engage tool, hextech alternator synergises perfectly with your ridiculous ignite electro damage, the passive giving you 5 flat pen is amazing since you can get 18 from sorc shoes and another 5 from mejais since it counts as a legendary, the more flat pen you stack the more efficient it gets.
 

Second item:

Mejais Soulstealer allows you to single-handedly decide whether you wish to win the game or lose it, it’s a must buy and goes hand in hand with this playstyle, one two kills with a mejais, over 10 stacks? Literally the game is a done deal at this stage. Rocket belt mythic passive giving you 5 pen for a 1250g purchase makes it even good to buy at 0 stacks. I have completely 1v9’d too many games to count in the highest of elos because enemies make literally one mistake and die once.
 

Third item:

Void staff third? WTF what if enemies have no mr elite? Well let me tell you about this stupidly broken item that straight up out damages a god damn DEATHCAP even at 30 mr !? ? ? the item is 131% gold efficient, let alone when you pile up your 28 flat pen that you get from completing it. Remember flat pen reduces enemy MR AFTER the percentage, so let’s say someone has 50 magic resistance when you buy your void, magic resistance WH OMEGALUL? 28|40% stats on 50 mr leaves enemies with a whole 2 mr, 2 mr!!!!!
 

Fourth item:

Rabadons Deathcap while not nearly as good as it was last season still will round up your build, if you have just a few mejais stacks and you get these 4 holy items, the game is literally already over. Few champions can experience the delightful feel of going in 1v5 and returning at higher hp than before.
 

Shoes:

Unless you’re rocking cosmic insight and want türbo low summoner cd, sorc shoes are the must go 100% of the time. Why would you need damagereduction from tabis if you oneshot enemies, why would you need merctreads tenacity if you can just dodge with your W 4Head. Sorc shoes penetration just perfectly synergises with the rocketbelt mythic passive since the more flat magic pen you stack the more potent it becomes.
 

What the hell is the last item?

 
At this stage your power is so strong the final item won’t make a big difference, need dps? Cosmic drive, need a second pool? Zhonyas, need spellshield vs evelyn and zoe? Banshees. The itemshop is your oyster, get whatever you want last, I usually like to top it off with zhonyas.
This concludes the way of the gigalords setup and we’ll now proceed to the other setup.

Setup two, consistency king & lategamegod:

This play style was the meta for the longest of time and still remains viable, farm for 30 mins and then fight once and win the game 4Head. This playstyle relies less on your opponents being bad and more so on the inevitable victory that is 300 cs vladimir at the same time it’s also praying that your team doesn’t just perma fight for no reason which kinda happens a lot as well in soloq because people like fighting for no reason.
 

Summoner spells:

Ever thought how if everyone does just one thing the same way people would become insecure to try anything else but that specific way? That’s my opinion on using ghost > flash.
 
With this setup I prefer taking ghost over flash and ignite secondary. Why? Now that ghost’s duration gets refreshed on kills or assists and gives tremendous move-speed while only being on a 182 second cd with cosmic insight (163 with lucidity boots) allows you to have it up at literally every possible random teamfight, the mobility is insane for laningphase as well. If you can kill your opponent with flash in a certain scenario ghost will do the job and more, what do you do vs a vladimir that has kill pressure on your and pressed his nitroboost button? Flash away? Jokes on you this shit lasts 10000 years and he’ll just inevitably catch up.
 
Ghost in teamfights is also ridiculous, pop it right before someone dies and you have like 15 seconds of speed duration, can catchup to literally anyone even foolish galeforce buyers who think they are cool with their mini dash.(bit pixelated)
 
Ignite secondary lets you have some decent kill pressure even with this setup
You can of course go whatever you please, struggling with bully mages? Go flash tp, feel like you can’t catchup to that Ezreal in the backline? Flash ghost is the answer, etc, it’s all viable and just needs playing around.

Runes

Keystone:

 
Phaserush has been Vlad’s most consistent rune since seasons now. It offers a lot of versatility in the sense that it can be used to slide in an extra auto in trades, chase people down, escape ganks easier and of course mainly to slide into the backline like Michael Jackson moonwalking on the rift.
Just like electrocute it’s really easily proccable, just three swift strikes and you’re running like yourprincess runs from apologizing to Tuesday
Even your initial ult cast counts as one of the strikes, so you could ignite ult q and boom you’re already zooming.
 

Minor runes, sorcery:

Nimbus cloak is an insanely good rune for vlad since the main thing you lack is mobility, and the more you have the easier it gets to get even more. If you have a reliable way of proccing phaserush such as nimbus cloak ignite all your mobility issues are fixed.
 
Transcendence just like with the electro page it helps you lane giving you cdr as early as level 5, and if you stack enough ability haste with zhonyas or even legendary double stopwatch you can always do some funky last fight game winning shit like –> pool –> zhonyas –> get asisst so trans ticks in –> stopwatch –> pool again. It’s like 10 seconds of immunity winning you uber clutch games.
 
Gathering Storm what better rune suited for the lategame king himself. All other options like waterwalking and scorch are completely outclassed by this free stats rune. I’d say Vlad is the most efficient champion in the game when it comes to flat ap considering you have ap to hp conversion, absolutely massive ap scalings with damage and healing (wtF), and an amplification on all abilites with your ult.
 

Secondary runes, Inspiration:

Free boots are really good at helping you scale up consistently and the 10ms it gives you on top of regular boots means you just zoom that little bit extra.
 
Cosmic Insight is also amazing at lowering your summonerspells, combined with haste shoes you can get almost 70 seconds off your flash, how insane is that.
 

Build

If you’ve been shocked by going ghost ignite you’re going to be quite surprised by this.
 

Starting item:

Just like with electrocute, dark seal refillable is a beyond bonkers good item to start with, however since we get free boots with this setup going dorans ring is a more affordable purchase as well into a more difficult matchup like Orianna or Syndra. My logic is if you back with ~ 350g you’ll be having to choose either between dark seal or boots, but since boots are out of the equation you don’t even need to think about them so dorans ring is a lot more affordable. At the same time this setup focuses mostly on reaching unholy power as fast as possible.
 

First mythic:

Mythic? Only insecure players build mythic items first.
We build DOUBLE FIENDISH CODEX that’s right. Become unstoppable. Vlad turns AP into a hyper efficient stat already with his insane scalings, so what about a 114% gold efficient PURE ap and ability haste stat? Fiendish codex’ passive is no longer unique so you can stack them.
From experience I’ve felt that anything more than 2 feels awful and going only 1 is also a viable option, although we want to accelerate ourselves and by this I mean let’s say we just pushed out midlane wave and we have some tempo. Raptor camp is up and your jgler doesn’t need them, you take them in 15 seconds total, because of this, the next time you take them you could afford another item meaning you took them 10 seconds in total, the next time 5 seconds and so on and so fort.
Getting pure ap and cdr allows you to do this faster and ultimately accelerating yourself to a point of having 300 cs at 25 minutes and being able to completely devour anyone in sight.
 

Second item:

Since I’m addicted to Mejais I like to buy it second, however with this setup you can skip it, if you fall behind even slightly mejais won’t get the free 5 penetration that you would’ve gotten with a regular rocketbelt build and it becomes really hard to get back into the game. Just remember if you need the power of GOD to win this game, don’t hesitate to buy the holy bible.
 

The real Second item:

Now that you have around ~ 100 ap Rabadons deathcap becomes efficient, even in its pathetic nerfed state it’ll still transform you into an onmipotent being. Deathcap is 92% item efficient with just it’s own AP and gets increased by 20% for every 100 ap so making it at MINIMUM 112% gold efficient of RAW pure AP power which Vladimir makes such enthusiastic work with. Now imagine if you had a mejais with some lucky 10 stacks on it, 136% gold efficient pure ap item combined with this? Oh Lord. Full mejais and dc = 357 ap = 500 hp more for FREE due to crimson pact.
 

Third item:

Most sane enemies when pressing TAB and seeing there is a 200 cs vlad at 16 minutes with a deathcap completed and double codex eagerly wanting to devour their feeble adc souls will attempt to purchase some magic resistance.
Falter their plans by buying an early Void Staff, just like the logic we applied earlier with electrocute, void staffs 131% gold efficiency combined with sorcerer shoes allows you to deal near true damage to low mr targets and to those with more than room temperature IQ who’ve built MR? Well you have a voidstaff, what good does it do them.
 

Fourth item:

Woo! It’s mythic time yayyy!
 
This is the most satisfying thing ever, building a mythic item when you have 3 legendaries all giving you instant mythic passive.
At this stage you can choose pretty much all mythics, need more haste? Go Nightharvester for unrivaled dps, playing against a lot of squishies? Unleash unholy burst with the Rocketbelt, enemies stacked giga nitro mega amounts of mr and you’re having a tough time penetrating through it? Literally buy a Liandry’s, it shreds enemy MR making your voidstaff and sorc shoes deal hyper amounts of damage. Since you have 2 codex Liandry’s is giga cheap at only 2500g and doesn’t eat up another inventory slot.
 
You can even decide to buy something else if you’re in desperate need for it like a Zhonyas or Morrelo, it’s not essential to have a mythic but I highly recommend it leaving it no later than this.
 

Last item (if you were a chad mejais buyer)

Just like the other electro setup, you may go whatever your heart desires as final ap item.
Enemies have a lot of ad? Zhonyas, need dps? Cosmic Drive, need magic res? Spirit or Banshees.
That’s pretty much it to the phaserush build, we’ll be covering when to go these setups next.
 

How to choose between the two setups

I am of the opinion that you can go either setup 100% of the time every game and not need to switch things up to find success, however there are scenarios where one is better than the other.
For beginners I recommend learning just one setup first or your opinion might get clouded by low sample size.
I also have a complete matchup spreadsheet with every matchup midlane in the game
 
If you’re more of the assassin player, wanting to oneshot specific targets and having ridiculously high kill pressure in lane I recommend going electrocute setup.
 
If you more feel like playing an actual controlmage and maintaining 10cs/min and unleashing unholy wrath lategame with zero counterplay then go phaserush setup.
 
In a realistic scenario if you’re laning vs melee champions electrocute is much better for lane and the minor runes will have a lot of effect vs them. You can go both setups in both types of matchups and it’s perfectly viable you just have to be aware of your weaknesses and play around them.
 
Currently I think the meta favours the electrocute setup a tiny bit more since there is a lot of early fighting and lane prio is important to help your jungler. That being said having ghost ignite phaserush means you can join any fight you want since your sums are super low so try both and see which one you like more.
 

Early laningphase and how to play matchups

Level 1 – 5

With both play-styles you want to play as safe as humanly possible with Vladimir pre 6, try manage the wave so it’s always near your tower so you can’t get ganked and are easily able to lasthit. It is ESSENTIAL to have on point last hitting skills, if you do not, go practice tool right now and get 100cs in 10 mins with only autohits. These early autohits really dictate the pace of the rest of the game, same theory with raptors, how much money you have dictates how much money you’ll be able to generate.
 
If your lane opponent doesn’t have teleport (mostly melees) you can play a little aggro and sneak in a quicky succ every now and then onto your lane opponent and eventually either deplete their hp so they have to recall or their mana so they become obsolete.
 
Don’t use your E early much as it mostly hurts yourself more than it hurts anything else, the self damage is always the same percentage so it really feels bad using it early to sprinkle tiny 60 damage blood bolts at the cost of like 100 hp.
 
You may spam Q on the minions as long as you don’t end up pushing the wave to the enemy, what makes vlad really hard to play in high elo is players will freeze the wave as soon as it starts to push vs them and it’s impossible to unfreeze unless you call your jungler to help.
 
If you’re playing vs someone with teleport it’s extremely ballsy to trade with them as if you do they’ll empty their mana on you and hp and just recall and come back leaving you with low hp and unable to buy items and locked in lane, going teleport yourself with phaserush of course halfway counters this awful spot to be in.

Level 1 – 5 early electrocute cheese

This strategy is really really easy to pull off, This video shows exactly how to pull this off, it’s incredibly easy to do with electrocute since you also have taste of blood and ignite if your lane opponent dares to contest this you can just punish them.
 
Basically you want to create a slowpush early, how do we do this? Try to fish for auto attacks or a Q on your opponent, aggroing the minions onto you, since they will chase you let them be pulled into your wave, while you drag them they will not be attacking your minions meaning the wave will push in opponent direction.
 
If you pull this off and just gently last hit the next 2 waves and then push in really hard when canon wave comes you’ll have stacked a MASSIVE ally wave under enemy turret while you have tempo to do whatever you like, recall get amp tome / ward for jungler / invade with jungler / anything you desire.
 
And what about my enemy mid, won’t he follow me and stop me? But how? He’s got 3 waves stacked under his turret trying to last hit them, he can’t just leave that or he’ll instantly lose the game.
 
This concept is very very important to vladimir players as your all ins are often able to 100-0 opponents, so if we do this strategy of stacking big waves at level 6- 9 and dive the lane opponent and they die they lose like 3 waves worth of cs, this is literally unbearably game losing for them and it’s SO easy to pull off especially in low elo. What on earth do you do vs a vladimir who stacked a wave, has an alternator, electro ult and ignite up and is furiously waiting to oneshot you? Literally no counterplay other than going barrier or buying hp / mr.
 

How do I get the wave to push into my direction so I can lasthit?

It’s very simple, most people will hit the wave level 1 like the utter troglodytes they are, just match their auto attacks and leave one out every few, once it slowpushes into your direction all you have to do is not kill the minions and let them be near your turret. The wave will ALWAYS freeze if 3 full hp caster minions are left alive and the next wave’s melee minions don’t go under tower.
 
Like this we can freely scale up to the lategame terror that Vladimir is.
 
My lane opponent has also read this guide and isn’t hitting the first wave? Wtf? If you can, push push push like your pregnant and try get your minions under enemy tower, if this happens the wave will simply bounce and start pushing towards you.
These 2 concepts are the simplest and most essential thing to know when playing Vladimir.
 

First recall

You’ve got around 1000g? You should start to look to setup a recall so you can either buy a fiendish codex (phaserush setup) or a hextech alternator (electrocute setup)

How do we do this?

We already know how to stack waves and crash them under enemy tower, so we simply preform just that, we push the wave out and once it’s under tower run away quickly and recall, the bigger the wave the better since it traps your lane opponent in lane while you get to recall and only lose 1-2 melees.
 
If you don’t want to lock your lane opponent in lane or they have tp or just don’t care didn’t ask, just push the wave out before or during cannon wave since cannon minions can tank like 8 or more turret shots meaning you have tonnes of time to walk back to lane without missing anything.
 
Not missing any cs during your recalls is really essential as Vladimir especially because you can’t afford to fall behind.
 
Vs mages who like to buy lost chapter it’s extremely important you figure out a way to force a recall before they get that 1300g because if they do somehow get that you’re in for a fun cock and ball torture session, especially with Orianna. That’s why if you can recall with 1000g you can get a fiendish and they’ll just feel awful buying a god damn mana crystal.

Post recall

You’ve just walked back to lane, you’re level 6 and have your 1000g item and haven’t lost more than 1 minions worth of exp. What do you do now?
 
Since you have some AP you finally get to have more than cannon minion levels of wave-clear
 
If you’ve got an easy matchup and are not afraid to push out the wave start pushing and looking for things to do on the map. It’s important to ask yourself these questions WHILE pushing so you don’t waste time making a decision when you already have tempo.
 
Can you kill your lane opponent? Dive him.
 
Can you help your jungler invade? Go for it, just remember you’re on a tight time limit if things don’t go well and you’ll lose farm mid with no gain.
 
Can you gank / dive bot/ top? If there is a guaranteed pay off, (know all summs, ults etc) then go for it! Just don’t risk anything, remember if both teams are equal you are likely to win because of vladimirs inevitable lategame scaling.
 
If you don’t have any options, simply ward or clear wards, going out of enemy vision forces your lane opponent to shit their pants and ping ? ? ?? ? ? ? ? where he go? Which takes focus from other players and makes them play accordingly.
 

Midgame

It’s VERY important to go to sidelanes IF
 
Your botlane’s tower died and now enemy adc and sup go mid and try to take yours, since you have fuckall waveclear you can’t hold them away from the tower and end up losing more and more. It’s very important to also not share exp since the support will probably try defend midlane with you, you want to soak up that juicy sololane exp and start exerting pressure in a sidelane.
 
If you see lots of champs in one spot be ready to move asap because a teamfight might break out, although as Vlad maintaining 10cs/min is above everything, you can’t have any less if you want to carry games so some teamfights are just lost causes and don’t hurt yourself more by trying to get there in time.
 
You can generally tell when a fight will happen when either:

• Herald is up and no dragon
  
• Dragon is up
  

 
If ally mid tower is still up and dragon is down and herald is up what do we do?
 
Of course sidelane top and tell your teleport toplaner to go bot and your adc supp to go mid, it’s very likely that a herald fight will start and you wanna be there.
 
If dragon spawns and your team wants to contest that? Sidelane botlane and rotate mid at least ~20 seconds before dragon spawn so your adc can walk up reliably.
 
The only fights you REALLY need to be a part of are for objectives especially dragon, ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY if you don’t have any dragons at all and enemies are stacking them.
 
Even the most terrible scaling champions like pantheon will be REALLY obnoxious lategame if they get something like an infernal dragon soul.
 
Just one or two dragons means enemy team won’t receive the dragon wincondition at like 20 mins which means the game will go on for longer, what happens if the game goes on for super long? Uh oh stinky poo poo lategame vlad arrived and you just take what you please at that stage of the game anyways.
 

Lategame & Teamfighting

This part of the game is much easier with phaserush and ghost especially with ghost since it also has built in scaling with level, duration and speed.
 
If you have the potential to reach the backline and kill them then that should be your priority above everything, in 99% of the scenarios this is easily achieved with ghost phaserush, since you literally can’t run away from a ghosted vlad. Not even Ezreal with double flash can run, not even kassadin with 4k mana can blink away in a straight line, and god have mercy if Vlad gets his ghost extended with an asisst or kill.
 
If you’re playing with electro and your rocketbelt isn’t enough to get you into the backline then try your best to hit as big of an ult as possible and peel for your next strongest member which is usually the adc. A fullbuild vlad demolishes anything that dares approach.
 
Most fights are extremely obvious when they happen late into the game, they’re either around sieging or around objectives like dragon and baron, you should always be around those when they spawn and farming nearby camps and minions.
 
Even late into the game you want to be farming farming farming, vlad is a super high resource champion, I’d honestly say the highest resource hog in the entire game, not even kassadin needs this much money, but not even kassadin can just engage 1v5 and demolish everyone.

Ability maxing

You want to max your Q first on both setups, however if you are ahead and are going for the double fiendish codex setup I recommend putting 4 points into Q and then start maxing E out, if you do this your E will oneshot the enemy casterminions extremely early, normally only after lvl 11, with this setup as early as level 9.
So Q → E → W and R of course at 6, 11 and 16..
 
If you’re playing vs a melee champ in lane going W level 2 is definetly viable and can catch people off guard like a talon jumping on you without expecting you to pool. It does decent damage and slows like crazy unexpected, good for making enemies eat towershots when they think they can just weave in and out.
 

Combos

There aren’t really many “combos” and it’s mostly just generic efficiency and logical thinking, you make up a lot of things on the fly. Here is a link if you are adamant on learning combos.  
Say we want to proc electrocute or phaserush level 1
Auto Q Auto
 
There is also a multitude of ways you can combo with quick cast, smart cast, input buffer etc.
For the full combo with all sums, what works best for me:
 
Smartcast all abilities, Q for an empowered Q ready,
Charge E –> Flash –> Release E –> Ult –> Q – Ignite
 
Some people like to ult first as it releases E automatically upon pressing R however I feel like it’s a tiny bit clunky and if you release E manaully it’s literally impossible to react to unless predicted.
Super late into the game if you have phaserush you could also if you see enemies clumped up and you know they won’t be for long:
Flash –> R –> E W
 
Since you flash you’ll instantly be able to ult and have nimbus cloak movespeed to make sure your E and W connect with someone, if they do you get phaserush and are able to chase everyone down once you come out of pool, pooling instantly doesn’t matter as much as well since if you hit a fat R it’ll heal you like crazy, this catches enemies off guard a LOT even in high challenger.
 

Skin Choice

Of course the most important part of the guide.
The tierlist goes like this:
 
Marquis: 9/10, Extremely small model, feels amazing to play with, cheap asf, regular ult is sometimes invis vs bigger targets like cho’gath.
 
Bloodlord 8.5/10, A timeless classic with absolutely insane taunting game, instantaneous laugh. Absolute badass voiceline, sounds and animations that make you feel allpowerful but at 1850rp? Idk..
 
Nightbringer: 8/10 Probably my most played, shortish cape, nice sounds and animations, literally invisible ultimate, beyond pay2win, if you’re looking for the most pay2win its probably this one.
 
Darkwaters: 7.5/10 basically budget nightbringer with a giga big nasty looking cape. Also has an invisible ult, arguably more invis than nightbringer.
 
Cosmic Devourer: 7/10 I like the stars aesthetic but imagine making a new skin without pay2win ult, what are you doing right??
 
Academy: 6/10 Kinda slick, not having a cape and being in a weird suit looks good but his hands look literally cancerbig.
 
Soulstealer: 5/10 wtf are these sounds, legit sound like it’s windy outside and has the most ugliest cape in the game.
 
Default: 4/10 bloodlord should be default and this should be removed, legit so beyond ugly.
 
Count: 1/10 Scuffed ass default vlad chroma so bad it should be against the geneva convention.
 
Vandal: dugu/10 You have to say no homo before using this skin, never touch another man’s skin.
 
Nosferatu ?/?? Absolute power.. At a price.
 

General tips

The minute you forget to farm is the minute you’re out of the game, always farm.
 
Taking jungle camps is really fast after double codex
 
Don’t be scared to use ignite generously, if it means your opponent runs out of pots they’re FUCKED since you can just trade 50 hp for 300 of yours and you’ll eventually outsustain.
 
If you want fast results NEVER blame your team, even if they fucked up, what good does it do you to just move on? Try figure out what YOU could’ve done to prevent x from happening
 
If you’re extremely strong and baron is already up, just tell your team to start it with you, you don’t have to finish it but it’s a for sure way of starting a teamfight and making enemies fight you when you want it. Worst case scenario you keep hitting baron, they steal it, you end their lives, gg.
 
The period of where you have crimson rush gets extended by E, Zhonyas, and Pool.
 
For some reason if you have enough cdr and pool as soon as your E ends and start a new channel in pool that E will have no animation and be invisible, not very usable though.
 
If you have any questions, ask me anything I’m always happy to spread light on things I didn’t elaborate on. I also stream of course on twitch.tv/elite500, if I didn’t cover something feel free to ask :D, preferably on the post instead of on stream so others can see it too, I'm streaming as i post this guide so i'll reply to comments in queue
streaming right now again so i'll reply to comments in queue

Before the translation
This season was Dopa’s last season before mandatory military service. He decided to talk about how he stayed at the top for so long, and how he views the game. He talks about what he considers to be his trade secrets. It's a long read, but I personally think that it gives insight into the mind of one of the best players to play the game, and arguably the best player never to go pro. You'll get to see how he views the game. The video is quite long, and I already have a wall of text, so I mainly translated what I thought Reddit would like. The video is labeled part 1, so I assume there's more. I may have translated a few things incorrectly, and remarks are welcome.
Edit: This is roughly half of the video, i might translate the rest if I have more time.
video link
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Edit: part 2 , part 3
WARNING: WALL OF TEXT
League concepts
Every player has their own way of playing League. No one ‘just’ plays the game. Each player views the game in a different way. Their understanding of the game then builds into their world view, which dictates how they play the game, or what they do as they play. The way I look at the game of League of Legends is very unique. I have built a world of my own. Viewers frequently ask me how to get better at League, and I always answer in the same way. I tell them to play whatever champions they want to play, and just have fun. I do that because in order actually help them play better, I would have to make them understand my viewpoint. I would have to show them the world that I have built. I thought that would take too long, as there is too much to explain, and I’m not even sure that others would understand the way I view the game. But as it's my last season of League before military service, I thought now would be a good time to at least try to make you guys understand my world of League.
To understand the way I view the game, you need to understand what a ‘concept’ is. So what are concepts? They are the fundamentals of the game. There are things in the game that give you huge advantages as long as you know about them. Those are concepts. If you know about them, you know them, and if you don’t, you don’t. Most people who play league of legends have little to no knowledge regarding concepts. If you want to a skilled League player, you have to know lots of concepts. That’s all there is to it. Let me give you a few examples.
Twisted Fate concepts
As you all know, I play a lot of Twisted Fate. Lets think about the concepts that have to do with TF. When you play TF, there are 3 basic concepts that you have to know about. I personally don’t think I’m a very good TF player. The reason that I appear to be better than others is because I am aware of concepts that others don’t know about. You could call that skill, but anyone could do what I do as long as they knew the concepts. The reason no one can climb like me is because they don’t know.
Runes and spells
Before we get into the details of gameplay, let’s talk about runes and spells. I personally don’t think that the choice of runes matter that much. Runes are balanced, so using one rune over another is a matter of taste. The important thing is that you have to play according to the runes and spells that you have chosen. The two major rune builds that I used on TF are unsealed spellbook with teleport, and Electrocute with ignite. Think about how you would lane when using those runes and spells. More importantly, think about how your play style should change according to the runes and spells you have chosen. Should you lane aggressively? Are you playing passively?
When you have electrocute, you should passively until level 5 and avoid trading whenever you can. Try to keep the wave frozen, and save as many potions as possible. When you have unsealed spellbook, you want to play super aggressively. Even if the opponent gets better trades, just use all 3 of your potions and keep trading. Play according to your runes. (reads chat) My chat seems to think that it's the other way around. They think that you’re supposed to lane aggresively with electrocute. Wrong. The greatest strength of ignite and electrocute is the burst damage you gain when you use your first ult. You don’t have teleport as backup if you die during the laning phase, so one death means you’re out of the game. On the other hand, unsealed sealbook lets you play more aggressively because you have teleport as backup in the event that you mess up the laning phase. Anyways, runes aren’t actually that important compared to the concepts of the champion. Lets talk about basic TF concepts.
Concept #1: base timing
The first basic concept you have to know when playing TF is that TF recall timings are decided in advance. Most people that play the champion aren’t aware of these recall timings. This concept is the probably the most important one regarding TF play. You hit level 5, use Q twice, and recall. Of course, you have to play according to the game situation. If you have to recall at 4, then you recall at level 4. But the important thing is that your gameplan revolves around recalling at level 5. Starting from level 1, your goal is to recall after using Q twice at level 5. You play around that goal, though that might not work out as intended.
So how does this concept work? What does using Q twice at level 5 even mean? Let me talk a little bit about TF first. When TF has minion dematerializer and uses it on the ranged minions, using Q twice at level 5 kills the ranged minions. Most people that play TF know this fact. At level 4, a cannon wave comes mid. When you cs the cannon, you become level 5. That’s around when the next wave comes mid. You use Q twice to kill the ranged minions, and then base right away. It’s okay to lose a few melee minions as long as you can base sucssesfully.
The opposing mid can’t contest your base because they need to last hit the wave. They also know that you based, So they usually push in another wave to get the item advantage, then recall. When you get back to mid lane, you use Q twice to last hit the ranged minions, and then you become level 6. What happens? You just learned ult, you have full potions and full health, your just used all your gold to buy items, and the enemy midlaner is still walking back to lane. Why? because you recalled at level 5 before they did. Now you have an uncontested use of your first ult, and have high damage potential because you just bought items. No one else in the game is level 6 right now, just you. The top laners are still level 5, and the bot laners are still level 4. The wave is also a cannon wave, so the opposing mid laner can’t even push the wave into your turret. You don’t even lose exp. That level 5 recall just created the perfect window of oppurtunity to use your ult. This is the first basic concept of playing TF. The difference between knowing this concept and not knowing it is huge. I’m not a great TF player, I just happen to know this important concept. I know this concept, so I always seem to have perfect situations for using my ultimate. It’s not something you can learn just from watching replays. You have to understand the underlying concept. Did you guys know about this? Of course you didn’t. (Reads chat) Stop lying guys.
Concept #2 &3
Next is the second Basic concept. I’ll show you guys first. (Clears wave twice) Did you spot the difference? The next concept is about vision when splitpushing. In League, minion vision is lost in the instant that they die. You calculate the time it takes for your Q to hit the wave, and then pretend to walk a different way while the minions are still alive. When the minions die, you go the way you intended to. This isn’t just a TF tip, but a tip for all split pushers who have skills that move. The opponent thinks you are moving in a certain direction, but you’re going somewhere else. You want to make sure that the enemy doesn’t know where you are.
The third basic concept is also related to splitpushing. As you all know, splitpushers apply more pressure the closer they are to the enemy base. In other words, there are times when you have to splitpush in dangerous situations with zero vision. You have to do this without dying. Knowing how far up you can push according to the enemy comp is important. Knowing how to run away with ult while splitpushing dangerously is the third basic concept. Against champions like olaf, you can just ignore them and ult away when you have to. Against champions like Elise, however, your ult can be interrupted by her E. So you use ult and walk into a bush. Then Elise has no choice but to use E at you, because it looks like you’re running away in the bush. So the important thing is to wait out the skills, and then ult away. This simple tip lets you split push so much further, which is often the deciding factor in games past 20 minutes. Ulting and walking into a bush might seem like nothing, but it is gamechanging.
When you ult back to your team, it suddenly becomes a 4 vs 5 because one of the enemy team members went top or bot to try and kill you. You can use that to clear away all of the enemy vision, which then allows you to splitpush without ult.
Concepts and laning
Are these concepts hard? No, they aren’t. Most of you could use them if you knew about them. However, you can’t utilize these concepts in-game because you don’t know about them. Most TF players don’t know about these thing, so it looks like my TF is better than other TFs. I always seem to be put in favorable situations, and my enemies always look bad. The thing is, I actually suck at TF. I always lose trades in lane, and most of my bad games are because I get shit on in lane. Theres no point in knowing these concepts if you can’t utilize them, and to utilize them you have to, at the very least, be able to go even in lane.
There are concepts regarding laning too. Lets see... let’s talk about the Orianna vs Lucian matchup. Off of the top of my head, here are some laning concepts.
Use Q on the three melee minions at level 1.
If Lucian tries to trade, always trade back even if Lucian procs PTA
Use 3 potions even if Lucian only uses 1.
If Lucian uses both q and w at level 3 to trade, just recall and teleport back to lane.
You’re letting Lucian trade favorably against you so he uses both q and w and you can recall. This is against d-blade ignite Lucian. Trade fast, then recall. Of course, these are just examples of concepts. There are far too many to talk about all of them.
How to find 'Concepts'
Now that I’ve explained what concepts are, it’s time to tell you how to learn these concepts. Theres no point in explaining concepts. The important thing is teaching you guys how to learn these concepts. If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but teaching him how to fish will keep him fed for life, you know? I’ve showed you some fish, and now I’ll show you how to fish.
When you play the games, there are games when you get shit on. If you aren’t winning indefinitely, you’ll lose at some point. When you lose, that's when you look at the replay. What put the enemy mid laner in a superior position? What did they do differently, and what kind of situation did they create? Of course, it’s impossible to completely control every aspect of the game. You’re looking for what they did better than you. Not just what happened, but why it happened. You have to look for the cause, not the result. They might not even be aware of why they won, but you have to analyze the game and find out what made things happen. I personally prefer looking at stomps, because they help you find out what breaks game open.
Back in the day, I was famous for my Kassadin. Did I develop the build? No, I didn’t. I was crushed by a famous Kassadin player, and I stole his build. And then I perfected it. There was a period when I didn’t play much TF because I didn’t think it was a very good champion. Then I found this TF one-trick on the chinese super server, and learned how to play unsealed spellbook TF by watching his replays. I never created the concepts myself, but stole them from other players. I was always better than the original players because I kept on thinking about the reasons, the causes instead of just playing.
There are people who were similar in skill to me in previous seasons who are now washed up and struggle to get out of diamond. The difference between me and them isn’t in mechanics. If I don’t update my concepts, I’m just another diamond player. If those players were to learn all of the concepts that I know, then they would be around the same level as me. I myself would just be another diamond player if I didn’t absorb new concepts all the time. I kept updating my database of concepts, and that's what kept me at the top.
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Quintessential Vladimir guide for season 11

 
Well hello there wonderful people. My name is Calvin and I stream under the name Elite500, as the title suggests, I’ve been challenger for 4 seasons now and ended it since the last 2.
 
I’ve played vlad throughout every meta, no matter how rough or how much the playstyle has changed, and I’m finally here, bringing to YOU the absolute ULTIMATE, QUINTESSENTIAL, HOLY guide, everything you will ever need for season 11. At the time of writing this guide I’ve played around 500 preseason games and half of them in high challenger.
 
Why play Vladimir? Doesn’t he actually suck? Isn’t he noobchamp?
 
Do you wish to experience the pleasure of entering teamfights and leaving them higher hp?
 
Do you want to dehumanise yourself to and not even recognise your fellow teammates as sentient meat lumps? Can you handle the responsibility to take every game post 20 minutes as your responsibility?
Of course you do.
 
 

Table of contents:

1. Setups: we’ll go over the main 2 setups including items, runes, summoners, and build
2. How to choose between the two setups and which play-style suits you best
3. Early laningphase and how to play matchups
4. Every matchup in the game including recommended setups for matchups
5. Unleashing unholy wrath upon your foes in mid to lategame
6. Combos
7. Skin choice

 

Setup one, the way of the gigalord:

Back in season 7 the chad vladimir players received an upgrade from thunderlords decree, electrocute, termed GIGALORDS back then, it’s power has been dormant and ever waiting since the nerfs of 2018.
 
This path is more optimally suited for those who wish to have devastating all in damage, those who wish to win lane as early as level 3, those who want to annihilate and leave them with .no counterplay 100-0s
 
This setup is best suited and optimally played against melee champions such as Sylas, Pantheon, Yone, Yasuo, Ekko, Akali, Kata, etc.
 

Summoner spells:

Ignite and flash are a must take with this setup, allowing you to deliver sudden oneshots with flash and having beyond unholy all in damage with ignite. Ignite also helps us with nimbus cloak and with procing electro.
 

Runes

Keystone:

Of course you’ll be taking electrocute as your keystone, it allows you to win a lot of trades early into the game, it’s easily proccable early with auto Q auto or auto E Q or even auto ignite Q.
The trading is nice although the main reason you take this keystone is for the HEINOUS all in damage it can do, most champions can literally be 100-0 oneshot at level 6 if they’re not innately invulnerable (looking at you galio).
 

Minor runes, domination:

Taste of blood is absolutely amazing and helps out in every melee matchup, feel free to swap this to sudden impact if you’re deranged and play this setup into ranged opponents. (sudden impact proccable with rocketbelt.
 
Poro ward is extremely consistent and can be stacked easily to grant you free 4 ap level 3 and 30 ap at around ~ 16 – 18 minutes depending on how actively you ward and where.
 
Ravenous hunter synergises so well with vlads huge point and click Q damage, easily accumulating 10’000 HP healed in a game. While it doesn’t sound like much, since the rune was changed from spellvamp to omnivamp it now will even heal you slightly on autohits even without stacks helping you outsustain early. Some crazy gamer chinese vlads will take ultimate hunter since their server is perma fighting, it’s also a viable choice but feels worse to me.

Secondary runes, sorcery:

For sure my favourite secondary tree to spec into, although this one is a lot more preference, I think all trees are balanced it’s just more playstyle, you flash like a maniac? Go inspiration cosmic insight with cdr shoes rush and enjoy less than 4 minute flash cooldown etc.
Transcendence holy MOLY this rune got such a nice change in season 11, 5 ability haste at level 5? Sign me the hell up. The ability cd refund is also amazing on vladimirs W since it’s basecooldown is like 30 seconds, allowing you sometimes to pool twice in fights.
 
Nimbus Cloak to make up for the lack of mobility before rocketbelt nimbus cloak helps out so much allowing you to kite and rundown pesky season 10 dashy champs with ease. Optionally gathering storm is also nice but with this rune setup you mostly play for early mid domination and nimbus is also great lategame. My games have been decided 1000x more by having more mobility in clutch scenarios than having 40 extra ap at 30 minutes.
For the mini runes always Ability haste, AP, and scaling hp
 

Build:

You best be prepared to build mejais.
 

Starting item:

Your starting item should be dark seal refillable every game, the dark seal buff now giving hp and 5 extra ap is absurdly good for vlad, random lucky early kills giving 10 ap is also beyond bonkers. Shaving off 350g on your mejais purchase is also essential.
 

First mythic:

Hextech Rocketbelt is by far the best mythic you can go in every game currently, amazing active, amazing components, amazing mythic passive, it’s just THAT good. The dash and ms is a great engage tool, hextech alternator synergises perfectly with your ridiculous ignite electro damage, the passive giving you 5 flat pen is amazing since you can get 18 from sorc shoes and another 5 from mejais since it counts as a legendary, the more flat pen you stack the more efficient it gets.
 

Second item:

Mejais Soulstealer allows you to single-handedly decide whether you wish to win the game or lose it, it’s a must buy and goes hand in hand with this playstyle, one two kills with a mejais, over 10 stacks? Literally the game is a done deal at this stage. Rocket belt mythic passive giving you 5 pen for a 1250g purchase makes it even good to buy at 0 stacks. I have completely 1v9’d too many games to count in the highest of elos because enemies make literally one mistake and die once.
 

Third item:

Void staff third? WTF what if enemies have no mr elite? Well let me tell you about this stupidly broken item that straight up out damages a god damn DEATHCAP even at 30 mr !? ? ? the item is 131% gold efficient, let alone when you pile up your 28 flat pen that you get from completing it. Remember flat pen reduces enemy MR AFTER the percentage, so let’s say someone has 50 magic resistance when you buy your void, magic resistance WH OMEGALUL? 28|40% stats on 50 mr leaves enemies with a whole 2 mr, 2 mr!!!!!
 

Fourth item:

Rabadons Deathcap while not nearly as good as it was last season still will round up your build, if you have just a few mejais stacks and you get these 4 holy items, the game is literally already over. Few champions can experience the delightful feel of going in 1v5 and returning at higher hp than before.
 

Shoes:

Unless you’re rocking cosmic insight and want türbo low summoner cd, sorc shoes are the must go 100% of the time. Why would you need damagereduction from tabis if you oneshot enemies, why would you need merctreads tenacity if you can just dodge with your W 4Head. Sorc shoes penetration just perfectly synergises with the rocketbelt mythic passive since the more flat magic pen you stack the more potent it becomes.
 

What the hell is the last item?

 
At this stage your power is so strong the final item won’t make a big difference, need dps? Cosmic drive, need a second pool? Zhonyas, need spellshield vs evelyn and zoe? Banshees. The itemshop is your oyster, get whatever you want last, I usually like to top it off with zhonyas.
This concludes the way of the gigalords setup and we’ll now proceed to the other setup.

Setup two, consistency king & lategamegod:

This play style was the meta for the longest of time and still remains viable, farm for 30 mins and then fight once and win the game 4Head. This playstyle relies less on your opponents being bad and more so on the inevitable victory that is 300 cs vladimir at the same time it’s also praying that your team doesn’t just perma fight for no reason which kinda happens a lot as well in soloq because people like fighting for no reason.
 

Summoner spells:

Ever thought how if everyone does just one thing the same way people would become insecure to try anything else but that specific way? That’s my opinion on using ghost > flash.
 
With this setup I prefer taking ghost over flash and ignite secondary. Why? Now that ghost’s duration gets refreshed on kills or assists and gives tremendous move-speed while only being on a 182 second cd with cosmic insight (163 with lucidity boots) allows you to have it up at literally every possible random teamfight, the mobility is insane for laningphase as well. If you can kill your opponent with flash in a certain scenario ghost will do the job and more, what do you do vs a vladimir that has kill pressure on your and pressed his nitroboost button? Flash away? Jokes on you this shit lasts 10000 years and he’ll just inevitably catch up.
 
Ghost in teamfights is also ridiculous, pop it right before someone dies and you have like 15 seconds of speed duration, can catchup to literally anyone even foolish galeforce buyers who think they are cool with their mini dash.(bit pixelated)
 
Ignite secondary lets you have some decent kill pressure even with this setup
You can of course go whatever you please, struggling with bully mages? Go flash tp, feel like you can’t catchup to that Ezreal in the backline? Flash ghost is the answer, etc, it’s all viable and just needs playing around.

Runes

Keystone:

 
Phaserush has been Vlad’s most consistent rune since seasons now. It offers a lot of versatility in the sense that it can be used to slide in an extra auto in trades, chase people down, escape ganks easier and of course mainly to slide into the backline like Michael Jackson moonwalking on the rift.
Just like electrocute it’s really easily proccable, just three swift strikes and you’re running like yourprincess runs from apologizing to Tuesday
Even your initial ult cast counts as one of the strikes, so you could ignite ult q and boom you’re already zooming.
 

Minor runes, sorcery:

Nimbus cloak is an insanely good rune for vlad since the main thing you lack is mobility, and the more you have the easier it gets to get even more. If you have a reliable way of proccing phaserush such as nimbus cloak ignite all your mobility issues are fixed.
 
Transcendence just like with the electro page it helps you lane giving you cdr as early as level 5, and if you stack enough ability haste with zhonyas or even legendary double stopwatch you can always do some funky last fight game winning shit like –> pool –> zhonyas –> get asisst so trans ticks in –> stopwatch –> pool again. It’s like 10 seconds of immunity winning you uber clutch games.
 
Gathering Storm what better rune suited for the lategame king himself. All other options like waterwalking and scorch are completely outclassed by this free stats rune. I’d say Vlad is the most efficient champion in the game when it comes to flat ap considering you have ap to hp conversion, absolutely massive ap scalings with damage and healing (wtF), and an amplification on all abilites with your ult.
 

Secondary runes, Inspiration:

Free boots are really good at helping you scale up consistently and the 10ms it gives you on top of regular boots means you just zoom that little bit extra.
 
Cosmic Insight is also amazing at lowering your summonerspells, combined with haste shoes you can get almost 70 seconds off your flash, how insane is that.
 

Build

If you’ve been shocked by going ghost ignite you’re going to be quite surprised by this.
 

Starting item:

Just like with electrocute, dark seal refillable is a beyond bonkers good item to start with, however since we get free boots with this setup going dorans ring is a more affordable purchase as well into a more difficult matchup like Orianna or Syndra. My logic is if you back with ~ 350g you’ll be having to choose either between dark seal or boots, but since boots are out of the equation you don’t even need to think about them so dorans ring is a lot more affordable. At the same time this setup focuses mostly on reaching unholy power as fast as possible.
 

First mythic:

Mythic? Only insecure players build mythic items first.
We build DOUBLE FIENDISH CODEX that’s right. Become unstoppable. Vlad turns AP into a hyper efficient stat already with his insane scalings, so what about a 114% gold efficient PURE ap and ability haste stat? Fiendish codex’ passive is no longer unique so you can stack them.
From experience I’ve felt that anything more than 2 feels awful and going only 1 is also a viable option, although we want to accelerate ourselves and by this I mean let’s say we just pushed out midlane wave and we have some tempo. Raptor camp is up and your jgler doesn’t need them, you take them in 15 seconds total, because of this, the next time you take them you could afford another item meaning you took them 10 seconds in total, the next time 5 seconds and so on and so fort.
Getting pure ap and cdr allows you to do this faster and ultimately accelerating yourself to a point of having 300 cs at 25 minutes and being able to completely devour anyone in sight.
 

Second item:

Since I’m addicted to Mejais I like to buy it second, however with this setup you can skip it, if you fall behind even slightly mejais won’t get the free 5 penetration that you would’ve gotten with a regular rocketbelt build and it becomes really hard to get back into the game. Just remember if you need the power of GOD to win this game, don’t hesitate to buy the holy bible.
 

The real Second item:

Now that you have around ~ 100 ap Rabadons deathcap becomes efficient, even in its pathetic nerfed state it’ll still transform you into an onmipotent being. Deathcap is 92% item efficient with just it’s own AP and gets increased by 20% for every 100 ap so making it at MINIMUM 112% gold efficient of RAW pure AP power which Vladimir makes such enthusiastic work with. Now imagine if you had a mejais with some lucky 10 stacks on it, 136% gold efficient pure ap item combined with this? Oh Lord. Full mejais and dc = 357 ap = 500 hp more for FREE due to crimson pact.
 

Third item:

Most sane enemies when pressing TAB and seeing there is a 200 cs vlad at 16 minutes with a deathcap completed and double codex eagerly wanting to devour their feeble adc souls will attempt to purchase some magic resistance.
Falter their plans by buying an early Void Staff, just like the logic we applied earlier with electrocute, void staffs 131% gold efficiency combined with sorcerer shoes allows you to deal near true damage to low mr targets and to those with more than room temperature IQ who’ve built MR? Well you have a voidstaff, what good does it do them.
 

Fourth item:

Woo! It’s mythic time yayyy!
 
This is the most satisfying thing ever, building a mythic item when you have 3 legendaries all giving you instant mythic passive.
At this stage you can choose pretty much all mythics, need more haste? Go Nightharvester for unrivaled dps, playing against a lot of squishies? Unleash unholy burst with the Rocketbelt, enemies stacked giga nitro mega amounts of mr and you’re having a tough time penetrating through it? Literally buy a Liandry’s, it shreds enemy MR making your voidstaff and sorc shoes deal hyper amounts of damage. Since you have 2 codex Liandry’s is giga cheap at only 2500g and doesn’t eat up another inventory slot.
 
You can even decide to buy something else if you’re in desperate need for it like a Zhonyas or Morrelo, it’s not essential to have a mythic but I highly recommend it leaving it no later than this.
 

Last item (if you were a chad mejais buyer)

Just like the other electro setup, you may go whatever your heart desires as final ap item.
Enemies have a lot of ad? Zhonyas, need dps? Cosmic Drive, need magic res? Spirit or Banshees.
That’s pretty much it to the phaserush build, we’ll be covering when to go these setups next.
 

How to choose between the two setups

I am of the opinion that you can go either setup 100% of the time every game and not need to switch things up to find success, however there are scenarios where one is better than the other.
For beginners I recommend learning just one setup first or your opinion might get clouded by low sample size.
I also have a complete matchup spreadsheet with every matchup midlane in the game
 
If you’re more of the assassin player, wanting to oneshot specific targets and having ridiculously high kill pressure in lane I recommend going electrocute setup.
 
If you more feel like playing an actual controlmage and maintaining 10cs/min and unleashing unholy wrath lategame with zero counterplay then go phaserush setup.
 
In a realistic scenario if you’re laning vs melee champions electrocute is much better for lane and the minor runes will have a lot of effect vs them. You can go both setups in both types of matchups and it’s perfectly viable you just have to be aware of your weaknesses and play around them.
 
Currently I think the meta favours the electrocute setup a tiny bit more since there is a lot of early fighting and lane prio is important to help your jungler. That being said having ghost ignite phaserush means you can join any fight you want since your sums are super low so try both and see which one you like more.
 

Early laningphase and how to play matchups

Level 1 – 5

With both play-styles you want to play as safe as humanly possible with Vladimir pre 6, try manage the wave so it’s always near your tower so you can’t get ganked and are easily able to lasthit. It is ESSENTIAL to have on point last hitting skills, if you do not, go practice tool right now and get 100cs in 10 mins with only autohits. These early autohits really dictate the pace of the rest of the game, same theory with raptors, how much money you have dictates how much money you’ll be able to generate.
 
If your lane opponent doesn’t have teleport (mostly melees) you can play a little aggro and sneak in a quicky succ every now and then onto your lane opponent and eventually either deplete their hp so they have to recall or their mana so they become obsolete.
 
Don’t use your E early much as it mostly hurts yourself more than it hurts anything else, the self damage is always the same percentage so it really feels bad using it early to sprinkle tiny 60 damage blood bolts at the cost of like 100 hp.
 
You may spam Q on the minions as long as you don’t end up pushing the wave to the enemy, what makes vlad really hard to play in high elo is players will freeze the wave as soon as it starts to push vs them and it’s impossible to unfreeze unless you call your jungler to help.
 
If you’re playing vs someone with teleport it’s extremely ballsy to trade with them as if you do they’ll empty their mana on you and hp and just recall and come back leaving you with low hp and unable to buy items and locked in lane, going teleport yourself with phaserush of course halfway counters this awful spot to be in.

Level 1 – 5 early electrocute cheese

This strategy is really really easy to pull off, This video shows exactly how to pull this off, it’s incredibly easy to do with electrocute since you also have taste of blood and ignite if your lane opponent dares to contest this you can just punish them.
 
Basically you want to create a slowpush early, how do we do this? Try to fish for auto attacks or a Q on your opponent, aggroing the minions onto you, since they will chase you let them be pulled into your wave, while you drag them they will not be attacking your minions meaning the wave will push in opponent direction.
 
If you pull this off and just gently last hit the next 2 waves and then push in really hard when canon wave comes you’ll have stacked a MASSIVE ally wave under enemy turret while you have tempo to do whatever you like, recall get amp tome / ward for jungler / invade with jungler / anything you desire.
 
And what about my enemy mid, won’t he follow me and stop me? But how? He’s got 3 waves stacked under his turret trying to last hit them, he can’t just leave that or he’ll instantly lose the game.
 
This concept is very very important to vladimir players as your all ins are often able to 100-0 opponents, so if we do this strategy of stacking big waves at level 6- 9 and dive the lane opponent and they die they lose like 3 waves worth of cs, this is literally unbearably game losing for them and it’s SO easy to pull off especially in low elo. What on earth do you do vs a vladimir who stacked a wave, has an alternator, electro ult and ignite up and is furiously waiting to oneshot you? Literally no counterplay other than going barrier or buying hp / mr.
 

How do I get the wave to push into my direction so I can lasthit?

It’s very simple, most people will hit the wave level 1 like the utter troglodytes they are, just match their auto attacks and leave one out every few, once it slowpushes into your direction all you have to do is not kill the minions and let them be near your turret. The wave will ALWAYS freeze if 3 full hp caster minions are left alive and the next wave’s melee minions don’t go under tower.
 
Like this we can freely scale up to the lategame terror that Vladimir is.
 
My lane opponent has also read this guide and isn’t hitting the first wave? Wtf? If you can, push push push like your pregnant and try get your minions under enemy tower, if this happens the wave will simply bounce and start pushing towards you.
These 2 concepts are the simplest and most essential thing to know when playing Vladimir.
 

First recall

You’ve got around 1000g? You should start to look to setup a recall so you can either buy a fiendish codex (phaserush setup) or a hextech alternator (electrocute setup)

How do we do this?

We already know how to stack waves and crash them under enemy tower, so we simply preform just that, we push the wave out and once it’s under tower run away quickly and recall, the bigger the wave the better since it traps your lane opponent in lane while you get to recall and only lose 1-2 melees.
 
If you don’t want to lock your lane opponent in lane or they have tp or just don’t care didn’t ask, just push the wave out before or during cannon wave since cannon minions can tank like 8 or more turret shots meaning you have tonnes of time to walk back to lane without missing anything.
 
Not missing any cs during your recalls is really essential as Vladimir especially because you can’t afford to fall behind.
 
Vs mages who like to buy lost chapter it’s extremely important you figure out a way to force a recall before they get that 1300g because if they do somehow get that you’re in for a fun cock and ball torture session, especially with Orianna. That’s why if you can recall with 1000g you can get a fiendish and they’ll just feel awful buying a god damn mana crystal.

Post recall

You’ve just walked back to lane, you’re level 6 and have your 1000g item and haven’t lost more than 1 minions worth of exp. What do you do now?
 
Since you have some AP you finally get to have more than cannon minion levels of wave-clear
 
If you’ve got an easy matchup and are not afraid to push out the wave start pushing and looking for things to do on the map. It’s important to ask yourself these questions WHILE pushing so you don’t waste time making a decision when you already have tempo.
 
Can you kill your lane opponent? Dive him.
 
Can you help your jungler invade? Go for it, just remember you’re on a tight time limit if things don’t go well and you’ll lose farm mid with no gain.
 
Can you gank / dive bot/ top? If there is a guaranteed pay off, (know all summs, ults etc) then go for it! Just don’t risk anything, remember if both teams are equal you are likely to win because of vladimirs inevitable lategame scaling.
 
If you don’t have any options, simply ward or clear wards, going out of enemy vision forces your lane opponent to shit their pants and ping ? ? ?? ? ? ? ? where he go? Which takes focus from other players and makes them play accordingly.
 

Midgame

It’s VERY important to go to sidelanes IF
 
Your botlane’s tower died and now enemy adc and sup go mid and try to take yours, since you have fuckall waveclear you can’t hold them away from the tower and end up losing more and more. It’s very important to also not share exp since the support will probably try defend midlane with you, you want to soak up that juicy sololane exp and start exerting pressure in a sidelane.
 
If you see lots of champs in one spot be ready to move asap because a teamfight might break out, although as Vlad maintaining 10cs/min is above everything, you can’t have any less if you want to carry games so some teamfights are just lost causes and don’t hurt yourself more by trying to get there in time.
 
You can generally tell when a fight will happen when either:

• Herald is up and no dragon
  
• Dragon is up
  

 
If ally mid tower is still up and dragon is down and herald is up what do we do?
 
Of course sidelane top and tell your teleport toplaner to go bot and your adc supp to go mid, it’s very likely that a herald fight will start and you wanna be there.
 
If dragon spawns and your team wants to contest that? Sidelane botlane and rotate mid at least ~20 seconds before dragon spawn so your adc can walk up reliably.
 
The only fights you REALLY need to be a part of are for objectives especially dragon, ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY if you don’t have any dragons at all and enemies are stacking them.
 
Even the most terrible scaling champions like pantheon will be REALLY obnoxious lategame if they get something like an infernal dragon soul.
 
Just one or two dragons means enemy team won’t receive the dragon wincondition at like 20 mins which means the game will go on for longer, what happens if the game goes on for super long? Uh oh stinky poo poo lategame vlad arrived and you just take what you please at that stage of the game anyways.
 

Lategame & Teamfighting

This part of the game is much easier with phaserush and ghost especially with ghost since it also has built in scaling with level, duration and speed.
 
If you have the potential to reach the backline and kill them then that should be your priority above everything, in 99% of the scenarios this is easily achieved with ghost phaserush, since you literally can’t run away from a ghosted vlad. Not even Ezreal with double flash can run, not even kassadin with 4k mana can blink away in a straight line, and god have mercy if Vlad gets his ghost extended with an asisst or kill.
 
If you’re playing with electro and your rocketbelt isn’t enough to get you into the backline then try your best to hit as big of an ult as possible and peel for your next strongest member which is usually the adc. A fullbuild vlad demolishes anything that dares approach.
 
Most fights are extremely obvious when they happen late into the game, they’re either around sieging or around objectives like dragon and baron, you should always be around those when they spawn and farming nearby camps and minions.
 
Even late into the game you want to be farming farming farming, vlad is a super high resource champion, I’d honestly say the highest resource hog in the entire game, not even kassadin needs this much money, but not even kassadin can just engage 1v5 and demolish everyone.

Ability maxing

You want to max your Q first on both setups, however if you are ahead and are going for the double fiendish codex setup I recommend putting 4 points into Q and then start maxing E out, if you do this your E will oneshot the enemy casterminions extremely early, normally only after lvl 11, with this setup as early as level 9.
So Q → E → W and R of course at 6, 11 and 16..
 
If you’re playing vs a melee champ in lane going W level 2 is definetly viable and can catch people off guard like a talon jumping on you without expecting you to pool. It does decent damage and slows like crazy unexpected, good for making enemies eat towershots when they think they can just weave in and out.
 

Combos

There aren’t really many “combos” and it’s mostly just generic efficiency and logical thinking, you make up a lot of things on the fly. Here is a link if you are adamant on learning combos.  
Say we want to proc electrocute or phaserush level 1
Auto Q Auto
 
There is also a multitude of ways you can combo with quick cast, smart cast, input buffer etc.
For the full combo with all sums, what works best for me:
 
Smartcast all abilities, Q for an empowered Q ready,
Charge E –> Flash –> Release E –> Ult –> Q – Ignite
 
Some people like to ult first as it releases E automatically upon pressing R however I feel like it’s a tiny bit clunky and if you release E manaully it’s literally impossible to react to unless predicted.
Super late into the game if you have phaserush you could also if you see enemies clumped up and you know they won’t be for long:
Flash –> R –> E W
 
Since you flash you’ll instantly be able to ult and have nimbus cloak movespeed to make sure your E and W connect with someone, if they do you get phaserush and are able to chase everyone down once you come out of pool, pooling instantly doesn’t matter as much as well since if you hit a fat R it’ll heal you like crazy, this catches enemies off guard a LOT even in high challenger.
 

Skin Choice

Of course the most important part of the guide.
The tierlist goes like this:
 
Marquis: 9/10, Extremely small model, feels amazing to play with, cheap asf, regular ult is sometimes invis vs bigger targets like cho’gath.
 
Bloodlord 8.5/10, A timeless classic with absolutely insane taunting game, instantaneous laugh. Absolute badass voiceline, sounds and animations that make you feel allpowerful but at 1850rp? Idk..
 
Nightbringer: 8/10 Probably my most played, shortish cape, nice sounds and animations, literally invisible ultimate, beyond pay2win, if you’re looking for the most pay2win its probably this one.
 
Darkwaters: 7.5/10 basically budget nightbringer with a giga big nasty looking cape. Also has an invisible ult, arguably more invis than nightbringer.
 
Cosmic Devourer: 7/10 I like the stars aesthetic but imagine making a new skin without pay2win ult, what are you doing right??
 
Academy: 6/10 Kinda slick, not having a cape and being in a weird suit looks good but his hands look literally cancerbig.
 
Soulstealer: 5/10 wtf are these sounds, legit sound like it’s windy outside and has the most ugliest cape in the game.
 
Default: 4/10 bloodlord should be default and this should be removed, legit so beyond ugly.
 
Count: 1/10 Scuffed ass default vlad chroma so bad it should be against the geneva convention.
 
Vandal: dugu/10 You have to say no homo before using this skin, never touch another man’s skin.
 
Nosferatu ?/?? Absolute power.. At a price.
 

General tips

The minute you forget to farm is the minute you’re out of the game, always farm.
 
Taking jungle camps is really fast after double codex
 
Don’t be scared to use ignite generously, if it means your opponent runs out of pots they’re FUCKED since you can just trade 50 hp for 300 of yours and you’ll eventually outsustain.
 
If you want fast results NEVER blame your team, even if they fucked up, what good does it do you to just move on? Try figure out what YOU could’ve done to prevent x from happening
 
If you’re extremely strong and baron is already up, just tell your team to start it with you, you don’t have to finish it but it’s a for sure way of starting a teamfight and making enemies fight you when you want it. Worst case scenario you keep hitting baron, they steal it, you end their lives, gg.
 
The period of where you have crimson rush gets extended by E, Zhonyas, and Pool.
 
For some reason if you have enough cdr and pool as soon as your E ends and start a new channel in pool that E will have no animation and be invisible, not very usable though.
 
If you have any questions, ask me anything I’m always happy to spread light on things I didn’t elaborate on. I also stream of course on twitch.tv/elite500, if I didn’t cover something feel free to ask :D, preferably on the post instead of on stream so others can see it too, I'm streaming as i post this guide so i'll reply to comments in queue

I was watching my old posts, and I noticed that I had done a text version on the league craft 101 videos, so I thought that maybe it would be a good idea to post it here again since it has been 4 years since I have done it.
It covers most of the basics in the game, and really important mechanics for beginners and intermediatte players so hope you guys enjoy.

League craft 101

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1 - Trading Stance

• Stand on your dying minion
• Prioritise CS over damage on enemy
• Time the approach with your trade
• Zone in front of the dying minion

2 - The Retaliation Trade

• If your support gets all-ined don’t run away and instead focus the ADC
• Take care of cooldowns (engage when they don’t have abilities)
• All-in or trade to save the support

3 - Lane Control

• Use the techniques in 1 and 2
• Trade and push-up phase: Trade while farming and pushing; get higher level faster; focus minions
• Lane control phase: Stop pushing (Zone, Slow Push, Reset and Freeze)
• Zone: Care vs. strong junglers; stand behind enemy minions; prepare a countergank
• Slow Push: Use trading stance; try to dive or free drake; have the jungler near your lane
• Freeze: Make the wave stop near your tower to make enemy lose XP and CS

4 - Team fighting

• Direct Initiation: Create a fight; the fight can start with 1v5; carries do not go in
• Follow Up Initiation: Tanks pressure backline; force everyone to use cooldowns; carries stay OUT until tanks use cooldowns
• Hit Tanks: Hit tanks after cooldowns are used; force backline cooldowns; carries don’t dive backline (stay out of range); try to be in range of only 1 enemy
• Kill Backline: APC flashes the backline OR finishes off the tanks; ADC can dive if no enemy burst cooldowns are up; Tanks can make a flash play
• Cleanup: Flash to kill enemies escaping; focus objectives after fight

5 - How to get fed in lane

• Use trading stance
• Pressure Canon Minions
• Be careful of pushing the lane
• Punish Dash Usage: If they dash to you, you can all in, make your decision quickly
• Level 6 all in: Watch XP bar; push before getting level 6; engage immediately
• Lane control: Freeze for ganks; push lane for roams; care breaking freezes

6 - How to Roam

• Cheese Roam: It’s a random roam with no reason; don’t do it; not planning will always end up in loss of XP and CS
• Bread and Butter Roam: Push wave into turret; roam when minions hit the turret; doesn’t matter if the enemy knows you are coming
• Reaction Roam: Watch the mini map; move immediately; most of the times following enemy is more important than farm

7 - Assassin Team fighting

• Direct Initiation: Only do it when enemy is out of position (Fizz R, Kassadin R, flash plays)
• Hit tanks Phase: Don’t go deep; counter-engage will 1 shot you; watch for CC and cooldowns
• Kill backline Phase: Burst front line and tanks OR flash bomb back line; DON’T use Zhonyas when you are about to die use it to reset cooldowns

8 - How to Carry

• Win Lane: Level 6 all-in; manipulate the wave for ganks and communicate flashes; apply info in 1,2,3, and 5 to win lane
• Reaction Roam: Following the roam of your enemy laner; If you don’t do it you will lose; check the mini map every 2-3 seconds; apply info in 6
• Control Vision: DEWARD wins games; WARDS stop you from losing
• Don’t die: You lose objective control and vision

9 - How to Jungle

• Jungle Priority chart: Counter Gank > Minion Crash Dive > Gank Overextending lane > Take Objectives > Push when enemies leave lane > Hold Lanes > Invade and Ward > Power Clear
• How to Gank: Wait for bloodlust; Gank lanes that are trading; chose ganking paths that go behind enemies
• Minion Crash Dive: Check for low enemies getting pushed; come around the back side; dive from behind when minions crash
• Save your KDA: Don’t throw deaths for kills; save your bounties and ultimate/flash; don’t give the enemy opportunities

10 - Carrying From Jungle

• Levels and Gold: Level makes you unkillable; Gold gives you damage
• Always remember the Jungle Priority Chart
• Common Mistakes: Stop ganking so much; try to avoid ganking losing lanes; get a winning lane ahead to contest the fed enemy
• Item builds: Build Hybrid damage tank after jungle item

11 - Minion Crash Dive

• Accelerates the games
• Creates Gold Swings
• Equivalent to 4-6 CS + Kills if successful
• Step One – Approach: Push your lane first then Roam; don’t arrive too early; don’t go through warded places (use pinks)
• Step Two – Prep: Let all your members surround the enemies; approached them from the back; if the enemies TP ask for team to cancel
• Step Three – Tank: Let your tank go first; Ping target then CC it and drop all damage; tank it until 1 shot from death
• Step Four – Burst: All-in after the 1st person engages and use ignite first to prevent heal; calculate how greedy you can be
• Step Five – Objectives: Evaluate your priorities (turret/farm/baron/drake/bush wait)
• Take leadership and be careful with timing

12 - Manipulating Back Timings

• Under rated way of generating advantages
• After a Kill: Look for a reset on wave into a new wave and freeze or just recall; staying with gold is losing lane pressure
• Optimal Scenarios: Return to lane with wave pushing against you; freeze and get a gank; build a big wave and go for a minion crash dive
• If you kill the enemy and the wave is pushing against you; consider just recalling
• Call ganks when you get back to lane

13 - Playing Losing Lanes

• When do you lose lane? They outrange you, they out damage you or both
• Trade and Push: Trade while farming and pushing, get higher level faster; focus minions (doesn’t work Plat above)
• Don’t push the lane: Opens you to ganks; lets them freeze; if you push it call jungler to break the freeze
• Avoid Trades: Play like a little bitch; probe for CS but care trading stance; stay high health and CS under turret
• Don’t push with range abilities

14 - ADC Team fighting

• Direct Initiate Option 1 (if they have 1-2 initiators): Enemy has to dash to initiate; QSS or flash allow you to frontline
• Direct Initiate Option 2: Dash to an isolated target to force a fight; QSS only if they turn for you; only do it if you know you will win the fight
• Direct Initiate Option 3: Walk around in circles; wait for direct and follow up initiates to go down; majority of team fights happens before you QSS
• Wait for cooldowns to be burned
• Hit tanks Phase: Be in range of 1 person at a time; maximise your DPS by kiting; learn to attack move under pressure
• Kill Backline: Turns marginal leads into game winning leads; calculate what you can get away with

15 - Diamond Eyes (Why you can’t climb)

• Every loss is your fault because you didn’t make the plays to win
• Avoid dying
• Putting enemies in tough spots forces mistakes
• Use dedicated practice to improve small things at a time

16 - How to Outplay

• Every time you would flash away think of an outplay
• Plant the ability you need to flash
• Know what abilities/summoners they have

17 - Advanced Bot Laning Phase Guide

• Zones Recap: Take trades when even or ahead on zones; be aware of bush or zone extenders (Braum W, Blitz W), supports takes the lead and ADC follow
• Lane Matchups: Bad ADC matchups can be made up by supports
• Sustain > Poke, All-In > Poke, All-In >>> Sustain, Disrupt > All-in, Poke >>> Disrupt
• Lane Control: Push and Trade Phase, use trading stance
• Proxy Lanes: Janna/Soraka lanes; zone with trading stance instead of trading
• All-in/Disruption Lanes: Support has one big cooldown; Support stands in front against All-in; carry lots of potions against poke; ignite vs. Sustain
• All-in/Disruption Tactics: Timing attacks; vision denial; trading stance abilities; flash combo with gank; hook through dying minions; all-in of the end of the wave
• Miscellaneous Tips: ADC and Supp buy pinks; back at the same time; support doesn’t need to stay to get CS; you get more CS being together

18 - Mid Game and Rotations

• Octopus theory: ward and sweep areas you can walk to safely
• Rotations: moving from one place to another, good rotation is arriving when a wave hits another lane’s turret
• Mid Game: Most games become ARAM, people don’t know how to deal with lane swap and rotations
• Mid Game Plan: Works in solo queue, centered around winning Bot lane: Take dragon; take Bot turret; lane swap to top; top and supp/jungle stops Bot; counterpart of supp/jungle helps take top turret
• Mid Game Plan: playing mid game when behind is easier; react to what opponents do and try to rotate in time; get as much vision as possible

19 - Priority & “Win Lane, Win Game”

• Laning techniques: Trading Stance; Retaliation Trade; Lane Control; get fed and punish
• The missing piece: Defensive items builds allows you to win trades and survive all-ins; defensive build lessens your all-in threat; building damage often concedes lane priority
• Lane Priority: Lets you crash waves into turret
• Priority Strategies: steal enemy chickens; help jungler invade; push and bread and butter roam; minion crash dive your lane
• How to win solo queue: stop teammates that are ahead from throwing; make your losing lanes self-sufficient; predict and nullify the enemy jungler
• When to build defensive: if the defensive item builds into something that’s optimal; if the enemy has someone with 1 shot potential

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Side Notes: I did this to gather all info I could from Leaguecraft 101, it might not be perfect but it was the best I could do. All credit goes to the creator of the videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/unswlolsoc/videos).
Small edit: First, just wanted to thank everyone for the kind comments, hope the guide helps you grab those wins next season. Secondly, just wanted to recommend watching the videos cause they give more context then just my text version, and that way you help the original creator too. Thanks!!

First of all, I would like to thank my best friend for his very hard work and patience. 99% of my games were played with him watching me live on share screen. That means he watched me play around 450 hrs of my gameplay. He also watched my vods with me, where I tested his patience by getting angry that he corrected so many things at once. He also 1v1 me a few times. I realise how lucky I am to have an opportunity like this, and learning from someone like this taught me so many things about the game that made it feel very different to me. Right now, gold IV doesn't feel like a good elo, because there is a lot more to learn.
I have been playing league since season 7 and I started out playing pretty much Sona. I couldn’t play any other champs and I would play only sona. This caused me to learn nothing about the game, but somehow I was silver 3. So it’s possible of course to climb spamming a champ, more on that later.
Preface ( you can skip to the points if you want): When I met my friend, he told me to switch to jungle, because we couldn’t decide what role was best for me. So I played jungle for a season and I got to gold IV as a jungler with his help teaching me. That was last season. This season, he told me that even though I can play jungle, I’m still not playing league. So he said I need to make a fresh account, and play midlane control mages and try to get to gold. I thought this was going to be easy. I was very wrong. I started out bronze 1 I think, and I demoted to bronze 4. I could barely control my champ, and my ego took a hit too because I couldn’t believe a bronze 3 Zed main was shitting on me, a gold jungler. It made me realise how much I wasn’t playing the game. How much I missed out playing Sona, and playing jungle. But I kept going, and he kept teaching me. There is so much to say, I’ve been fed so much information. It’s very difficult for a high elo player to teach low elo, because the game they play is very different. I watch many of his games, and so many things he does and thinks about simply can’t be implemented into low elo. There was one time I was against orianna mid, and as soon as minions reached our laneand I saw her move I knew she was diamond. That’s how big the difference is.
Anyway, here are some points I think are important, and some things I had to learn/do in order to improve. I could go on forever...
Please note I might be biased. Maybe there are other ways to play and improve, but I was taught by one person, I trust my friend and I am his little fanboy

1. Understanding the difference between playing to climb/win and playing to IMPROVE.

This was a difficult concept for me to accept, even now, but my friend kept repeating it. You can go into ranked games, and play them out, and you can basically go 50/50 it. Dice roll whether you get the good teammates, matchup, whatever. You’ll still hit gold. You can even hit diamond if you play enough games. There are animals in diamond as much as there are in low elo. It doesn’t matter. A good example is a streamer called Gross Gore. He is a TF one trick who has been diamond 1 since season 3, but if you watched him play the game you would realise that he knows nothing about the game besides playing his own champ right. He can’t play other champs, he can’t control his lane, he can’t itemise. Many players are like this. You can decide whether you want to improve at the game as a whole, or you want to just reach a certain elo. The best mentality you can give yourself is to not care about the outcome of the game, only to focus on what you want to improve. Every game I would go in thinking about what I’m going to focus on. There are times, especially towards the end of the season, where I felt I didn’t have time to focus on improving and I would go in with the intention to win., and I would go on loss streaks and get tilted. When I was tilted it was 100% guaranteed that I was dice-rolling my game because that’s when I would make mistakes, and start to notice what my teammates were doing, and typing. When I played to improve, I wouldn’t even realise what’s going on with my teammates, and most of the time I would end up winning my lane and able to help out my teammates who were behind. Low elo is a great place to practice many new things. You are less likely to be punished for your mistakes. This point is number 1 because it’s the most important thing I had to learn. Stop complaining about your teammates, stop typing in chat, don’t focus on win or lose. Just play to improve every. Single. Game.
Don’t type, don’t flame, don’t [?] Ping for no reason. Do not try to talk to your animal teammates,
just play your best.
​

1. Champion pool (I only play control mages)

​
This was something that was very important and saved me a lot of time. I had to pick 3 SIMPLE champs only. For me, this was mainly Veigar, along with Annie and some Lisandra, but I would say 90% of my games were veigar. There’s no point in playing more than 3 champs when you’re trying to improve. There’s no point in trying to pick up a complicated mechanical champ. You will waste so much time trying to play a complicated champ, it will take away from you actually trying to learn the game. For example, I love champs like Zoe, but taking the time to learn a champ like that means that I waste time focusing on tiny details. A good champ to learn when you’re starting midlane is Annie. The important key here is that she is for learning, not climbing. I didn’t want to play Annie for a really long time, because her range sucked and herabilities felt slow to me. But when I realised my positioning and movement sucked, I played Annie and this helped me improve a lot. She is a very simple champ, with a simple kit, who challenges you but also teaches you a lot. She is also very easy to learn how to punish mistakes, and good to learn matchups and roaming times. I really recommend trying her at least for like a week. Just play her.
Other than that, I played veigar mainly. This champ is very unique. He is the ONLY champ in the game that literally increases in AP as you cs. His abilities involve a cage that can zone out enemies, win you team fights and objectives. He is not an early champ, but his leaning phase is simple and forgiving, and the champ forces you to focus on cs. However, I’m biased towards my little yordle so you can pick any champ you like, as long as it’s a simple one. Every champ forces you to learn something new.
​

1. Learn how to CS and MAINTAIN cs

​
CSing is a popular concept, everyone will tell you to learn how to cs. What they forget to mention is learn to MAINTAIN high cs throughout the game. Maintaining high cs is something many, many players in low elo forget to do, and this causes many lanes to lose early leads. This is true not just for midlaners.
For example, if you have a fizz or katarina vs a veigar in midlane. Fizz usually wins this matchup when he reaches level 6, or sometimes even level 4. The fizz is going to do what he does, he will roam, get more kills, get fed. Your team will spam ping you. You will succumb to the pressure from your teammates and follow the fizz, lose the teamfight, lose cs, lose objectives, and if enemies are smart enough they will end early. The problem with low elo players is they don’t know how to end games and play with leads. They will waste so much time doing pointless things so that games that would be over by minute 15 in master will go to minute 35 in silver. This is where late game champs like veigar, Kayle, and kassadin shine. By abusing this fact that these players will extend the game. The catch is that you have to cs. The fizz in this situation will be so blinded by his early lead, that he will keep chasing out kills throughout the game and forget to split and/or farm. By then, the best chance you have is cs. Maintaining your cs score throughout the game is very important, it basically keeps you in the game no matter if you’re behind or ahead. If fizz has 120 cs minute 20, and you have 200 cs minute 20, you are winning and the fizz is falling behind. If you want a good measuring tool for your cs maintenance, check your opgg. You should, as a midlaner, start by aiming for like 7 cs/min. If you go into games making this a focus (not neglecting your team) you will notice you will win a good percentage of your games. This is true for some junglers and adcs as well
(don’t know shit about top honestly)
​

1. Learn how to cs under tower, and wave control

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This is something I struggled with a lot when I was learning how to cs and maintain it. When I was taught how to cs under tower it made a huge huge difference for me, and I started to realise that most players in these elos do not know how to do it. I still don’t know how to do it 100% but every game I improve at it. CSing under tower is not easy for control mages. Very often, mages can get pushed under tower or pressured, especially by champs like yasuo, Syndraa, or Ekko. This causes you to miss cs that would otherwise be easy to get, and then this means that you can neither back nor get item. This gives your enemy advantage to roam and pressure you to fall behind. I suggest watching some videos on csing under tower, or watching a replay of a higher elo player doing it. If you have a patient friend like I do, ask them to go into a custom as Nunu vs you as control mage. They roll their w down midlane, and basically you will be constantly pushed under tower with uneven cs and you can practice all you want :D for csing in general I also suggest going into practice tool every day for 10 minutes. Do not buy items, do not level up abilities. Just practice CSing.
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When you feel more comfortable with these concepts, I suggest also looking up videos on wave control. Wave control provides you with a good advantage against your enemy. Knowing when to push, freeze, hold the wave is very important. There are some obvious things like.. don’t back without pushing your wave, don’t back until you have gold for an item you need, learn when to tp and when you have tp advantage, etc. I think freezing is also a good concept to learn, I didn’t learn how to freeze until I was silver 1 but it gave me a good advantage on having the upper hand in my lane when I felt I wanted more cs but could not risk walking up without dying. Freezing is nice to do when you are against champs like yasuo. Setting up a freeze against a yasuo is so easy, yasuo players will constantly push you under tower,and you should kinda let them. When a freeze is involved, you have even more cs. Just don’t forget to break the freeze before you base or roam... This is the video I used to learn
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An important note.. realise when cs under tower is lost, and realise when it’s better for you to take the L and back. If you have no mana, and your health is low, and your wave is shit, just back. It sucks but you get to come back with a better chance rather than risking yourself dying. This is really important if you realise you have tp, and sometimes coming back to lane with item advantage means that you win the 1v1 against your enemy with no tp who hasn’t based yet. It’s also good to realise when it’s a BAD time to roam. Do not give up cs to follow enemy mid roam. This means that he gets there faster, gets the kill, and you miss out on cs that would otherwise compensate. Just ping your team to back., Ping ping ping. If they miss it, then too bad. Not your fault. You need to focus on yourself and do not succumb to the pressure of your teammates. Your adc has been hard stuck silver for 7 seasons, why should he tell you, a midlaner, how to play when he can’t even play properly? The proof that he’s bad is that he’s going to get upset and come to take your cs mid. Bad player. Mute
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1. Practice splitting, going sidelanes, and when to join your team.

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Sometimes maintaining cs difficult to do because for some reason adcs have a built in timer where at one point they will completely abandon their lane and come to yours. It’s crazy to me because I will look bot and see both towers still up, but your jinx insists that mid is the family lane now. Soon enough, your jungler will come mid, your toplaner is mid, and it’s just ARAM. This is bad for BOTH teams, because this situation forces you to share XP and farm. This point is actually very important to junglers as well. This is actually the most infuriating thing these players do, I’m getting angry just writing about it. It’s also a very difficult concept to explain, because your actions at this point are very situational and it takes a while to learn how to decide where you should go. There are some times where you should stay with your team and fight, because if not you cause a big number disadvantage.
But other times, if you realise they are literally just standing there doing nothing, ping them away and then ping that you are going sidelanes. I promise you 100% of time during these ARAM nonsense periods, if you look sidelanes and jungle you will see:
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Top is pushing
Bot tower is going down
Your jungle camps are all up
There are no objectives to be taken.
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That’s it, there’s cs to be picked up, and no objectives to play for. The logical decision is going to take that sweet cs. I usually advise against chatting and stuff, but at this point just try to talk some sense into your team and explain that you need cs and you are going sidelane. Tell your jungler his camps are up. Tell your team enemy team is losing their time, farm for cs and depush. Whatever it takes. At this point, splitting or farming guarantees a big advantage for you and your team in terms of xp, gold, objectives. This is a common mistake with junglers as well,they will come to lane for no reason and push a lane. They will take bot cs while their jungle is up, so by the time adc walks bot the lane is already pushed and the adc will overextend and die etc. Of course this is all situational, my best advice is to think about these things constantly, try to maintain cs, and know when to and when not to join a teamfight. Sometimes the difference between this might be that you get death cap, a huge power spike for midlaners. Usually as a midlaner I will push only one or two waves, and then walk mid to join my team. It takes trial and error but soon enough you will see the big difference between these situations and why it’s so beneficial. This is basically why champs like tryndamere are so broken in low elo.
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1. Realise what your champ wants to do, your matchups, watch replays

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Every champ is situational. Every champ will teach you something new about the game.
There is a huge difference in playing 100 games on a champ, and watching 5 replays of a high elo player play the same champ. The latter is better. I learned this the hard way, I have attention issues and it’s very difficult for me to watch videos. It took me a while, but I completely believe that this is one of the most important things to do when you’re trying to improve.. watch someone better play your champ. League is now at a point where we don’t have to figure things out ourselves, we can learn from others. Generally, I like to stay away from click bait videos and “tutorial” videos unless there is something really specific I want to look up, like a combo or a guide on wave control. I almost always type in “x champ replay” and usually watch a KR GM or Challenger play the champ. If you’re really into a certain champ, I also advise going to KR opgg and searching for one tricks of that champion in high elo, favouriting their page and following their builds. The more you look into it, you will start to find foreign one tricks who are amazing... mangofish for fizz, xiao Lao ban for ekko, veigar v2 (European), love veigar (kr), etc. Please trust me and watch as many replays as you can. It will make an almost immediate difference watching someone better than you play your champ. Similarly it’s also important to watch your own replays... however painful they might be... I highly encourage screen recording your gameplay instead of downloading league replays, so you can see where you are clicking and looking. That also leads to my next point...
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1. Be conscious of your clicks, and practice camera control

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Okay, this might not apply to everyone... but actually, I think it could. I have never seen how anyone from my elo plays, but according to my friend I click in the weirdest, worst way, and I don’t use my camera and minimap enough. I didn’t know what he meant until we watched my own replay and I saw where my mouse was clicking. At first, I used to click too much. Then, I fixed that and I realised that I click too far from my character, so I had to fix that too. I used toalso click my character AWAY from fights and that caused me to miss out on so many potential kills. My clicking is still bad, I can see that, but what I did to remedy the situation was to play games where I ACTIVELY made an effort to click shorter and better. It was extremely difficult at first, because I felt like I had less control, but after about 10 or so games it improved. Clicking is a very habit based thing, so you neeed to make sure you’re feeding the right habits. I think my crazy clicking started from watching faker play. While spam clicking isn’t the problem, the issue is when you start to click like a maniac in the wrong places..I can guarantee a lot of players do this without realising. Also, now that I’m not playing serious ranked games anymore, I’m playing more melee “fighting” champs that allow me to practice better clicking.
Camera control is another thing that needs working on, but luckily I think this is something very easy to fix it just needs some getting used to. I used to be a lock screen Andy, believe it or not. That was easy to do playing Sona, because the champ basically did nothing and her abilities were high range. When I was learning unlock screen it was so difficult, I was basically playing ping pong with my camera. I still have the screen recording of me trying to control my camera as a Velkoz, it was crazy. After fixing my setting to something I’m more comfortable with, I went and watched replays where I could see what other players were looking at. League is about information control, your minimap, camera buttons, and your tab are the most important keys to that. This is still something I actively work on, and it’s honestly munch easier to practice when playing jungle, but every time you improve how quickly you cam grasp information, the better you will be at punishing enemies and figuring out your next steps. This is something that is pure practice.
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Also I don’t know if it applies to everyone, but I have small hands so pressing the F keys to see other lanes is difficult for me, so I have reassigned the, to zxcv. This is easier, maybe you will enjoy it too.
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Honestly, I have so many more things to say. But then I will end up writing so many things and I am worried about getting boring. These are my most important points, and I think some of these points are often overlooked by players. It’s very easy to forget improving, and wanting just to win. Especially when things like rank come into play. The most important thing to me was to forget about rank or winning. I hope you can do the same. Do not coin flip your games, do not rely on your teammates. Carry yourself out. Silver and Bronze are the worst elos to ever play in, a lot of players are basically burnt out, mental is boom, and will give you a hard time. You can't control them, you can't reason with them. Be the better player.
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I haven’t told my friend I’m writing this post, because he will say it’s very cringe and try to talk me out of it. When this post is live, I’ll tell him. If you have any questions for me or him, please ask! good luck to everyone <3
EDIT: fixed formatting

I've been seeing people try to say that the reason they arent climbing is because vlad is just bad or inferior.
No, unless you are challenger playing against god tier opponents this is simply is not true. He has around a 50% wr and undeniably has really good snowball potential. The reasons why elite500 or any other high elo vlad and you might have difficulties climbing are completely different, and should not be compared. Their difficulty stems moreso with getting ahead consistently though, not carrying games.
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Honestly, vlad is still one of the best champions you can pick for soloq if you want to climb quickly, if you have the mechanics and can snowball consistently you are simply just going to have more impact than most other mid lanners. I've been seeing people compare vlad to other ap champions like malzahar and xerath. If a malzahar gets 20 kills in lane what happens? he can probably solo kill 1 person guaranteed and then maybe 1-2 more if he gets lucky. Now what happens if our blood-lord vlad gets 20 kills? He'll one shot the entire team, increase damage for his allies and also heal his entire HP bar. If you are picking vlad, you have to realize that you are picking him for his snowballing potential, not his landing phase. it's the same thing with katarina and kassadin, you sacrifice your lane power and utility to gain more snowballing potential.
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Another argument I've heard is that vlads identity as a drain-tank is gone now that every champion with life-steal or omivamp can do basically the same thing. Now first of all, if someones out healing you on vlad, you might want to check out your CS per minute or k/d and compare. Secondly, vlad hasn't' really been a drain-tank for a while now. He's always being itemized as a burst-mage, and when you only build burst of course you aren't going to also be able to drain-tank as efficiently. Imagine if mundo could build full lethality and still outheal champions that itemize for sustain. That would obviously be really dumb.
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TLDR;
it's not vlads fault, its your own =(

Hi all! I'm new to Reddit--I actually sucked it up and made an account just to join this thread after years of lurking/reading threads but never actually interacting lmao
I'm an NA player who's new to Qiyana (only been playing her 3-4 weeks or so), but I looooove her. I love her kit, her playstyle, everything, and I've never grinded a champ so hard/worked so hard to get mechanically better with a champion. I'm talking hours on a smurf account, endless practice tool games, etc. I'm just super into her as a champ and I've fallen flat on my face playing with her SO much, but I really think she's worth it so I'm not giving up any time soon.
For reference I'm a mid main who can also play ADC and supp, and jungle and top if I have to. I've mostly played control mages (Lux, Lissandra, Syndra, Ahri, Anivia, etc.) and I have the most mastery with Lux at about 400k mastery points--so, a very different playstyle than Qiyana for sure. I've never played ranked but my friends who are gold are pretty adamant I'm somewhere in that vicinity--so lowish ELO is where I'm playing. I have a 60% winrate with Qiyana right now but that's tenuous at best. I go on really bad losing streaks, and I can say with a good amount of honesty that I'm not a person who tilts out super bad and starts playing like trash if I'm losing. I'm definitely not perfect all the time, but my general approach is to improve during each and every game, but I'm not sure I can do that by myself without asking for help since Qiyana's so complex for so many reasons.
I'm here because I think I want to main Qiyana, or at the very least master her way more and improve my winrate with her, and I'm struggling with a couple things. I know Qiyana requires both micro/mechanical prowess as well as hella strong macroplay, and as I get better with her mechanics and generally improve my macroplay I'm struggling with a couple things:
1) Playing from behind. Sometimes I get stuck in a losing matchup (for example, I just lost hard to a Talon who I firstblooded but then things went downhill from there--a combination of his team ganking/making plays and him getting ahead with a Goredrinker, and from there I couldn't do anything to him). How can I best impact the game when I'm not doing super well? Do you recommend just farming/split-pushing? Another approach? I just don't wanna be useless to my team and be the reason they tilt out.
2) Tanky/healing comps. Sometimes their team has like two tanks and a bruiser with hella lifesteal/health (e.g. Rammus, Nautilus, and Aatrox) and I have no idea what to do against comps like that. Is Qiyana just a bad pick in situations like that, or is there a way I can build to effectively help my team win the game? Sometimes I pick first and get stuck playing against a comp that's less than ideal for Qiyana. In situations like this I generally try to focus on the squishy backline (usually the ADC, enchanter support, another assassin, etc.), but other than that is there anything I can do to improve gameplay against a tanky/bruisy comp?
3) General itemization. I recently read that the Chinese build for Qiyana almost always includes a Serpent's Fang, which I've started building in matchups where the enemy has a shield (e.g. Kassadin). Is this mostly a situational item? I almost always go Duskblade but I know people build Eclipse as well. When do you go for which? Itemizing with her is probably the thing I'm weakest at right now with her and I feel like I'm blindly building (like I'll build an executioner's calling for anti-heal, but I've heard that's a terrible item for her until late game). I'm just pretty confused about how to build her and when and any and all help in this arena is very appreciated.
4) Trading in lane. I find that too often I go in during laning phase against my opponent, and all of the sudden everything's on cooldown and they're still alive and I haven't done enough damage and I'm stuck behind their minions with no escape. This is DEFINITELY me mistrading/using my combos/abilities poorly. I usually wait for them to use an important ability if I can, then I E(with blue)>auto auto>Q>W(wall)>auto auto>Q. I don't always nail it perfectly, but this is the general idea. Are there smarter ways to gap close/ bettedifferent combos?
Thank you for reading and sorry for the fact that this post is a general "how do I play Qiyana" post lol. I'll keep reading threads and practicing, and thanks to anyone who replies!!

For years I've been thinking about all the things in League that feel outdated so I went ahead and made a list of all the ways I felt older champions could be improved to bring them up to the standard Riot has for newer champions. The ways I will suggest improvement could be a full on VGU like how Akali and Mord were updated, a mini-VGU like what Ezreal/Morgana got a while back that doesn't change the whole kit but maybe one or two dated abilities as well as the character model and VFX, a simple kit rework like what Anivia recently received, or minor tweaks like updating in-game models and bringing old skins skins up to par (looking at you Magnificent Twisted Fate). Note: This is less about balance and more about looking good and feeling good to play! Also there’s no way Riot will ever get around to everything on this list. Here we go!

Aatrox

No suggestion.

Ahri

• Slightly outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.
• Somewhat linear kit but you could argue she's supposed to be a simpler champ.

The recent VFX update she received brought her pretty close to where she could be but a really old character animations limit how good her non-legendary skins could look. Update the model/animations and she’s good.

Akali

Not even going to try to make suggestions about her kit and visually she’s up to date.

Alistar

• Slightly outdated character model.
• Kit could use some minor tweaks to bring him in line with modern supports.
• Lots of skins without VFX although many aren’t 1350 (some reworks gave <1350 skins VFX so some hope here).

Alistar still feels like a solid support pick despite having one of the oldest kits in the game. Giving his skins some love could make him feel refreshing while staying a good remnant of early League.

Amumu

• One of the last remaining pizza feet champions. Outdated character model.
• After being a menace with new items/ult changes, was nerfed pretty hard. Could use some kit tweaks to shift him away from mostly a low elo champion.

Amumu is like Dr. Mundo in that he’s a goofier feeling champion in the more serious evolving world of LoL. If you like that about him, you might say he doesn’t need any changes visually. He received a solid VFX update last year that just leaves his character model in question. I’d say make him less of an R on a stick and leave it up to his playerbase whether Riot should update his character model.

Anivia

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.

Received a nice VFX update that gave her old skins some love and received a kit rework that really brought her up to par with newer champions. I’d say the only thing holding her back is a character model that moves in some janky ways.

Annie

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.

Annie received the treatment I’ll suggest for many champions in that she received a VFX update that made her old not-so-legendary skins true legendaries and even went so far as to give her many skins <1350 unique VFX. The only reason I’d suggest a model update is because I see what she has in Wild Rift and want that for her on PC.

Aphelios

No suggestion.

Ashe

• Slightly outdated character animations.

Her base model looks pretty good but moves in a very stiff way when considering she’s supposed to be a nimble archer. Make her move more dynamically.

Aurelion Sol

• Revert W.

I’ve seen a lot of sentiment that players (especially mains) liked Asol much more as a control mage that valued positioning and consistent damage with his old W rather than his burstier playstyle now. It’s clear Riot failed in trying to expand his playerbase with the W changes. Revert W and address other parts of his kit that might be limiting interest in him.

Azir

• Make less balanced around pro-play.

I don’t pretend that I’m good enough to understand the limits of this champ but it’s clear that how he exists now is that only the most skilled players can utilize his kit well. I think many players like this about Azir but I also hear from some players that they’re tired of him being balanced around pro-play. I’m not sure how to please both groups but I’m sure there’s some way to open him up to players lower than Diamond and have him feel okay in high elo solo-queue while not tearing up pro-play.

Bard

No suggestion.

Blitzcrank

• Outdated character model.

I think Blitz holds up insanely well for how old he is. Riot has kept him up to date with VFX changes and minor kit tweaks. Even his model looks fine in the modern game, although the Wild Rift model indicates it could be slightly improved.

Brand

• Outdated character animations.
• Mid lane viability?

Similar to Ashe, Brand’s character model feels very stiff and it limits how good his skins could look. Riot made some decent changes to his kit last year that made it feel better and increased his winrate in mid but failed to increase playrate there. I like to play him mid but he feels a bit outclassed when his only CC is a conditional, skill-shot stun and his W can easily be dodged with all the mobility in mid lane. There’s a bit of a catch-22 where the combo conditions in his kit are what makes him unique but also they also hold him back from matching up to modern mid laners.

Braum

No suggestion.

Caitlyn

• Outdated character animations.
• Arguably outdated character model.
• Lack of VFX on old skins.

Another example of old champ model stiffness. I’ve seen some desire among players to improve her base model look as well. Also another case of hoping to get VFX on skins that are <1350.

Camille

No suggestion.

Cassiopeia

• Lack of VFX on old skins.
• Mana changes to make her less reliant on tear (already in the works according to Riot).

I can only hope to someday get the full High Noon treatment on Desperada Cass. Hopefully mana changes make her feel a bit better to play. She holds up really well overall though.

Cho’Gath

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.
• Lack of VFX on old skins. Looking at you Gentleman Cho.
• Outdated kit.

I’ve seen some desire on Reddit to give Cho’Gath a VGU that would change him into a truly terrifying void beast. His character in League feels like it’s trying to be that but then his 12 story tall character model sways up to you and then yells really loud. Keep his size gaining gimmick and make him evolve visually as he gains size in the same way that Kayle’s character model changes. There’s a lot of potential with his character and it seems wasted his kit. Gentleman Cho unique animations and VFX too.

Corki

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated VFX.
• Outdated kit.
• Lack of VFX on old skins. TWO legendaries without unique animations/VFX.
• Another victim of pro-play centered balance.

To me, the only possible reason Corki hasn’t received a full VGU is that nobody cares about him. He looks and feels so out of place in modern League. There are definitely interesting parts of his kit. The conversion of AA damage to magic is really cool and his ult is a bit unique in how it synergizes with spellblade items. The Package seems to take up a lot of his power budget that could be used to make the rest of his kit more fleshed out. His Q, E, and R are decent abilities but the visuals and sound don’t match their impact and make them fun to use. How exactly to rework an old Yordle flying a helicopter made of junk into a “modern” feeling champion without losing his character completely is beyond me although I hope Riot gives Corki some love soon.

Darius

No suggestion.

Diana

I know there are some people who weren’t happy with her mini-rework but it did a lot to increase her viability and popularity. No suggestions for her.

Dr. Mundo

Already being reworked. I love how it seems to be coming, Mundo still feels goofy but is a lot more expressive. His old skins without VFX are also getting some love. So far, this seems like a rework that will be the benchmark for reworking goofy champs like Corki or Amumu.

Draven

No suggestion.

Ekko

No suggestion.

Elise

I might argue for some character animation improvements but I think she’s holding up pretty well.

Evelynn

No suggestion.

Ezreal

A rare example of a mid level rework that I think would be great for some champs like Twisted Fate.

Fiddlesticks

This is what I want for Cho’Gath. Fiddle looked silly and had an outdated kit and his rework made him terrifying and people enjoy playing him so much more.

Fiora

No suggestion.

Fizz

No suggestion.

Galio

No suggestion.

Gangplank

• Sometimes balanced around pro-play.

Gangplank is definitely intended to be a 5head champion that takes a lot of time and skill to master. I don’t think he’ll ever have a great winrate below Diamond nor should he but it can be frustrating for solo queue to have nerfs show up everytime a pro Gangplank meta comes around.

Garen

• Lack of VFX on old skins.

Lots of <1350 skins with no unique VFX while Annie got unique VFX on her skins regardless of price point. In Annie’s case it was a Riot VFX artist’s passion project so unless there’s someone who loves Garen over there, I doubt Riot will bother touching those skins.

Gnar

No suggestion.

Gragas

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.
• Lack of VFX on old skins.

Really all Gragas needs is to have his character model/animations match Wild Rift. Lots of potential creativity with VFX on old Gragas skins too.

Graves

• Lack of VFX on old skins.

Same as Garen.

Hecarim

No suggestion.

Heimerdinger

• Lack of VFX on old skins. No unique animations/VFX on legendary Alien Invader Heimer.

After typing it out for so many champs, I’m being reminded of how many skins there are without new VFX. It would take a lot of time without much monetary return for Riot to implement VFX on weird, niche skins like Blast Zone Heimer. Reminding myself and those still reading that list is idealistic and not at all what I expect Riot to actually implement. Alien Invader Heimer definitely still needs to be made appropriate for its legendary status.

Illaoi

Weird example of a champion that has never been terrible and sometimes is even great but whose playrate has always been low. I think it’s fine for some champs like Illoai to be more niche especially since her kit and visuals feel modern. Small QoL changes could help her popularity.

Irelia

No suggestion.

Ivern

Was recently changed in a way that clearly helped his winrate and playrate. No suggestion.

Janna

• Outdated character animations.

Janna feels a bit stiff just like Ashe and Cait and probably needs a whole new character model to fix those issues. Notably her hair looks and moves like it’s all one connected mass and nothing at all like hair blowing in the wind. Otherwise, she’s in good shape.

Jarvan IV

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.
• I think Riot forgot to give him a W.

One of the worst offenders of the stiff animations club and it’s very apparent on skins like Pool Party that otherwise look great. Also, give this guy a decent W ability please. It has to be in the top 5 most useless abilities in the game.

Jax

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.

Riot gave him a much needed VFX update recently but the mix of 2020 VFX and a 2009 character model feels strange. Wild Rift already did a pretty good job fixing this.

Jayce

• Just Jayce melee AA animation.

Jayce holds up well but why does his melee AA animation look so jerky and awkward? Fix that and he’s fine.

Jhin

No suggestion.

Jinx

No suggestion.

Kaisa

No suggestion.

Kalista

• Either make her W active a real vision tool or change it completely.

What were they thinking with this ability? It’s so easy for enemies to just walk around it. Make it faster, increase the sight range, make it unkillable, or just change it completely.

Karma

No suggestion.

Karthus

• Karthus can auto attack?

Why is the wind up so damn long? It’s miserable trying to CS with his AA’s. Players have shown concern over his shift toward jungle and away from mid and I can’t help but think his non-jungling viability would be helped a ton if they gave him an AA that you could actually hit instead of having to Q everything.

Kassadin

• When Kass is good, the game revolves around him.
• Failed anti-mage fantasy.
• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.
• Lack of VFX on old skins.

I love the idea of Kass on paper. Having to manage mana while deciding whether to use R for damage, wave clear, or mobility. He has potential nuance but it all goes down the drain when his gameplan involves hitting level 16 and that’s it. He’s supposedly an “anti-mage” champion but people rarely play him to simply counter mages, they play him to get pentakills in the late game. There have been multiple periods of Kassadin dominance where games become “ban Kass or end game ASAP.” This isn’t fun for Kass players or the players on the other team. Deliver on the nuances his kit promises and make clear whether his role is as a counter pick to mages or to be a late game monster and have his kit reflect that. Also Pre-Void Kassadin is the ugliest skin in the game.

Katarina

• Mains adore her, everyone else dreads her.
• Outdated character animations.

I know I’ve been flirting pretty heavily with the balance side of things for a list that’s intended to address visuals and gameplay enjoyment. I won’t comment on Kat too much other than that she has a very dedicated playerbase and that she’s controversial among non-Kat players. Finding a way to reduce how much people hate playing against her while keeping mains happy seems difficult. Aside from that, her model animations are pretty stiff.

Kayle

No suggestion.

Kayn

No suggestion.

Kennen

• Outdated character model.
• Outdated character animations.

Kennen’s in-game model is underwhelming when you look at his splash. Update his character model and fix his rigid animations, ideally to match the kind of dynamic animation his ninja counterpart, Akali, shows is possible.

Kha’Zix

No suggestion.

Kindred

• Didn’t fulfill the promised gameplay fantasy that was set out for the champ.

Kindred has steadily risen in popularity over the course of her existence and seems to be in a good place now but players still complain that her lore and promised “two champs in one” fantasy was not delivered on. It doesn’t seem like Riot has plans to fix those issues but if it ever comes up, they should definitely weigh the wishes of her current playerbase with the potential for her character if Wolf had a more active role.

Kled

No suggestion.

Kog’maw

• Reliance on Lulu.
• Reliance on heavy peel.
• Horrible passive for an ADC.
• Ideal gameplay scenario involves auto-attacking so fast that you’d need a script to properly kite.
• Niche tank-shredder identity.
• I take back what I said about Pre-Void Kassadin, Monarch is the ugliest skin in the game and his base model has aged poorly.

Where to start. Maybe don’t give an ADC a passive that requires dying. Kog also relies way too heavily on having a Lulu whose kit seems to be specifically crafted to be much better with Twitch and Kog than other ADC’s but that’s probably more of a Lulu issue. His linear, hyper-carry kit can lead to uninteresting and unfun gameplay dynamics like “protect the Kog’maw” pro-play strategies. His kit allows for very little skill expressiveness outside of kiting and then late in his build, he attacks so fast with Lethal Tempo that trying to kite just reduces how quick he can attack so he usually just stands in one place and tries to kill enemies before they can reach him. He has a “tank-shredder” identity where supposedly he’s a stopgap for another dreaded tank meta but I’m not sure how true that is or how healthy for the game that kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship would be. I think Kog’maw has a lot of issues that Riot should take a look at and the first one is deleting Monarch Kog’maw from the game.

LeBlanc

• Outdated character animations.

Her model’s animations on all of her abilities look pretty awkward. A touch up would really help bring out more of her character.

Lee Sin

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.

There are a ton of these champions who were made way before Riot had the resources to give champions amazingly dynamic and expressive animations. There’s a reason so many people use Muay Thai, God Fist, or Storm Dragon Lee Sin. Lee Sin’s base animations ruin otherwise great skins like Nightbringer or FPX.

Leona

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated base VFX (mostly E).

Leona has some stiff animations on a few of her abilities and the VFX for her E doesn’t match the impact or the hitbox of the ability. Leona feels fine otherwise.

Lillia

No suggestion.

Lissandra

• Low appeal.

I remember a couple seasons ago, Lissandra was one of the best mid laners and there was plenty of groaning over her waveclear, mobility, and R. Since being nerfed Lissandra has returned to being a champion with low playrate and a subpar to decent winrate. It might be nice for Riot to try again to increase the appeal of the character without going so far as to have another Pick/Ban Lissandra meta.

Lucian

• Slightly outdated character animations.

Looking at Lucian next to Senna, it’s very apparent which champion is older and I’d say most of that is in how his model moves.

Lulu

• Oriented too heavily toward hyper-carry ADC’s like Kog’maw and Twitch
• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.

As was mentioned earlier, she synergizes too well with Kog and Twitch (and Yi when funneling was bigger) to the point where you could be considered trolling picking either ADC without a duo queue Lulu with you. It’s fine to have specific synergies and her identity should always be synergizing with attack speed ADC’s but there’s a limit to that for the sake of her playability with champs like Jhin, Ezreal, or mages in bot lane. Doing something like removing some power on her W and allowing it to also activate on spell casts in the same way they changed Nami’s E is just one example of how they could make her more flexible. Visually, Wild Rift and the recent Yordle cinematic show Lulu as she should be. Right now, she’s terrifying (old Lollipoppy vibes).

Lux

• Outdated character animations.

Lux received a great VFX update that only leaves something to be desired in her dated model animations. Update those and Riot can have even more excuses to make 1350 Lux skins.

Malphite

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.

Wild Rift Malphite is rock solid.

Malzahar

• Wave clear under turret and then R the strongest enemy. One dimensional kit countered completely by QSS.
• Outdated character animations.

There’s almost zero nuance or skill expression in Malzahar’s kit. You could argue he’s meant to be a simple champion for beginners to learn the basics but that fact seems to rely on the fact that new players also don’t know what QSS is. I don’t know how to make him a less linear champion but there are some parts of his kit that could serve as a starting point to making a more interesting champ. E spreading is unique and his spell shield could offer more skill expression as a basic ability like Sivir or Nocturne.

Maokai

No suggestion.

Master Yi

• Amumu has a pizza footed friend.
• A kit that revolves around being as uninteractive as possible.

Yi lives next to Teemo as a historically despised champion in League. Yi at his best is oppressive and disheartening to play against. From Taric funnel strats to AP Yi to new Duskblade invisibility, Yi seems to find the most annoying ways possible to escape possible counterplay because if you can reliably lock him down, the Yi player can do very little to outplay. Riot should reanalyze whether Yi brings anything positive to the game in his current state and change him accordingly. He also looks incredibly dated in every possible way.

Miss Fortune

• Outdated character animations.
• Outdated character model.
• Heart jpegs.

Unlike other champs in this list, I don’t even feel like Wild Rift completely did MF justice. A lot of her animations still feel stiff and there are still heart jpegs on her W. Animation work could do a lot to make her feel as sexy and badass as she is portrayed in cinematics.

Mordekaiser

Please for the love of all that is holy make the particle effect colors consistent on his skins. Why bother giving King of Clubs a gold effect on his passive but then none of his abilities match that? Same with Lord and Dragon Knight.
End of Part I
Looking closer at all the champions made me realize just how inconsistent Riot can be with unique VFX and also, just how many older champions have animations that feel out of place in one of the biggest games in the world. I'm already working on Part II which will contain the rest of the champions. Let me know if there's anything I missed that you think should be added.