Well, servers are down. Suprised? I’m not. In the meantime, I figure I’ll post some impressions regarding Vladimir. As I’ve said in every post since seeing his skillset, I’m pretty worried about how broken he appears. Take a look at the spotlight.

I think his skill set looks pretty cool, but consider what Phreak says about him.

“Vladimir excels at controlling the lane…At 500 health Sivir will die to Tides of Blood, Hemoplague, and Transfusion, even though I have nothing but a Doran’s Shield and runes (remember, health runes – not damage runes) for bonus damage.” Okay. That’s fine if he’s a caster with caster stats. But he gets health from his AP and vice versa, making him highly durable and highly threatening – bad mix.

“Gragas, Garen, and Sivir all try to kill me.” If you watch that point in the video (2:02), Phreak is way out of position, but he gets away easily because of Sanguine Pool. So far we have highly durable, highly damaging, excels at lane control, and has an escape mechanism. Got it?

“The invulnerability from the turret also makes diving a breeze.” Turret invulnerability…add it to the list.

“Vladimir really shines in team fights,” and, “My extreme damage output allows me to chop up Sivir very quickly,” and “Then as I take turret aggro, I use Sanguine Pool to dodge Sion’s Cryptic Gaze just before it hits me, allowing me to escape the turret.”

So here’s my question – where is Vladimir weak? He seems like the strongest 1v1 champion in the game, the best turret diver, a great farmer, probably a decent jungler, an absolute monster in team fights, and can escape anything you throw at him with a skill that is 1000 times better than Cleanse on a 20 second cooldown, you know, just in case you overextend.

This really makes me wonder how Riot selects an ability set for a champion. Is there some sort of matrix of skills/mechanics? If not, why not? If so, how did this guy get past the first stage of design without someone, anyone, saying “now hold on, guys, this is absurd.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to play him, but I’m just as unexcited about playing against him, and that’s not a good thing.

It’s patch day once again folks, this time heralding the release of Vladimir, the League’s first true vampire champion (sorry, Eve, kicking people with spiked high heels makes you ridiculous, not vampiric). This patch is also highly anticipated because of the Xin Zhao nerf.

First things first, let’s talk about Vladimir. I am nervous as hell about his position in the game. Any time you give a toon the ability to increase multiple stats by buying one item, I’m concerned. That was (and to some extent continues to be) the problem with Jax, and it will almost definitely be a problem with Vladimir. If you haven’t seen his Champion Spotlight yet, you should. It’s a little unnerving to see how early he can ignore towers and just how much damage he can deal with literally zero ability power.

The other big news is the Xin Zhao nerf. His attack speed scaling is getting a serious reduction, the AOE on his slow has been significantly reduced as has the magnitude of the effect, and his ult got a 20 percent reduction in percent-based damage and a slight nerf to base damage. He’ll still be disgustingly strong, mostly because his mana costs are so low and the fact that his ult is always up from the Battle Cry synergy.

The rest of the champion changes are either bug fixes or very minor. Kog’Maw, of all champs, got a small range nerf to his Bio-Arcane Barrage and a bit of a buff to Caustic Spittle. Comparing him to someone like Xin Zhao it seems ridiculous that his mana costs are still so high. Heimer got a little grenade nerf and Shaco took a small Deceive CD nerf. I don’t think either change will be enough to bring them off the permaban list, but with Vladimir almost undoubtedly filling one of those spots we might see a little more variety.

Other than that this patch is pretty unremarkable. My guess is Riot wants to wait out Season One a little longer to see which champions need a shift.