Vladimir has been a hot topic of discussion since release. Even today, when I rarely see him picked, there are still forum threads on a near daily basis wondering when he’ll be buffed, when he’ll return to viability, why he isn’t viable now, and so on. I know CC is all the rage these days, especially when it comes to AP carries, so where is Vlad’s place?
I still occasionally see Vlad do well when his team has enough crowd control to make up for his own shortcomings. He has to be careful, though. Against a strong AP with a stun, Vlad is susceptible to ganks, despite his pool. If he can be forced to burn his Flash early, Vlad’s health costs work against him early, leaving him open for ganks.
As many Rioters have pointed out, many of the solutions to Vlad’s problems are problems in themselves. Fixing health costs may improve his early game, but give him more damage or survivability and we could be rushing back toward the old days of Vlad.
For now, it looks like Vlad fans will have to settle for a legendary skin. Honestly, I can’t say I’ll mind seeing Vlad in a few games sometime soon. Sure beats Morgana.
Riot’s gone all out for Halloween this year, bringing us a boatload of new skins to celebrate the League of Legends equivalent to our spookiest holiday, The Harrowing. Just take a look at these skins compared to, say, the Olympic skins from earlier in the year. Remember Vancouver Amumu? Team Spirit Anivia? Now look at that Poppy skin and tell me you don’t want it. Even the Ryze skin looks badass.
All told, we have the following: – Nosferatu Vladimir – Lollipoppy – Zombie Ryze – Pumpkinhead Fiddlesticks – Mundo Mundo
That’s in addition to the Sorceress and Spellthief Lux skins that will be in the store once the servers are up. I’m going to spend a lot of money today.
First, I’d like to draw your attention to my awesome title for the champions introduced since season one launch who exceed most other champions at taking the solo lane: supermids. The reason I thought it up (I know, I’m so creative) was that I needed a way to talk about Vlad, Kog’Maw, Miss Fortune, etc. without typing that out every time I wanted to talk about the great carries in the game. Enough of that, though. On to the post.
I played two games tonight with a friend with hopes of breaking into the 1600s in ranked solo. I had been playing well all day and things just seemed to be going right. We lost. Both games. Hard. The biggest problem in both cases was our comp. In the first game my buddy was stuck in the mindset of 3s so he banned Singed. No biggie, still 3 bans, but we decided to joke around and ban Eve. That left a few strong toons on the board. Our opponent first picked Warwick so my buddy and I snagged Garen and Miss Fortune. Solid start for the team. Unfortunately, a teammate thought we couldn’t leave Kog’Maw on the board, so he picked him over some CC (Morgana was still available). Our fourth teammate chose Sona and I knew we were in trouble. Our fifth pick: Mordekaiser.
Sure, we had strong toons, but the sum of the parts was virtually nothing. Without crowd control to keep the enemy away from the carries, we got rocked. You can go too far in the other direction, too. For my next game I didn’t ban Amumu because frankly, a lot of people suck with him. The other team first picked Warwick again. I snagged Garen for a buddy and our second player picked Taric. We had said someone should get Amumu, but I was already thinking we were on the verge of being too tanky. With good DPS, though, we should have been fine. Our third player takes Shen and immediately locks him in, even though our fourth had said several times that he was picking Amumu, which he still did, leaving us with 4 tanks, short on damage. I had my friend pick TF in the hopes that we could stun them down. We couldn’t. Our outside lanes were getting worked and it was just a matter of time before our opponents had complete control of the map and we were too short on DPS to burn them down.
Even when the supermids are available, you have to focus on comp over individual toon strength. I asked everyone after the first game if they really thought we had a decent comp. The response was this: “You had Garen and Kog’Maw. Your comp was great.”
