Talk:Vladimir/@comment-4929259-20120510012213/@comment-65.92.172.192-20120510024726

1. I suppose your talking about his ult since it's his only skill shot. The range on it isn't fantastic but the aoe is pretty big, so as long as you try to position them in the middle of it you should always hit them unless they flash or something.

2. His learning curb isn't very steep. The main things you need to remember are to keep up 4 stacks of Tides of Blood, the right moment to use his pool and the right moment to use his ult. First of all you don't want to use your pool as part of your combo unless you're completley sure you'll get the kill if you use it or if you're completley sure you won't get ganked. As for his ult you don't want to use it on one or two people, you want to wait until you can get at least 3 people.

3. For runes you want M.Pen marks (ofc), HP per level or Armor seals, CDR glyphs and flat Health quintessences. I like to run 9/0/21 masteries on him but you can run pretty much any set of masteries depending on your playstyle.

4. Don't really know what you mean by this. You mean how hard is he to play? Pretty easy as long as you use the tips in question 2.

5. His W is an amazing ability. It can block almost every spell in the game, heavily discourages tower dives and slows people while making your escape. The thing is it takes 10% of you max hp tho, so you want to wait for just the right moment where you're not low enough to die immediatly after you come up but you don't want to lose too much health to it.

6. IMO he's not very item reliant. I usually manage to stay in lane til I have around 1.5k gold and earlier today i didn't go b til I had 3.2k gold. Really all you need is the CDR boots and WotA and you're good. He's pretty flexible with his build too.

7. His weaknesses are Ignite (for obvious reasons), long range champions and Grievous Wounds. The long range thing usually doesn't matter for me since I mostly play him solo top but if you want to go mid don't pick him against someone like Xerath. As for Grievous Wounds, you probably don't want to pick him if the enemy picks Fizz, or something. Not sure if Mercs work with Grievous Wounds but if they do the don't hesitate to buy them since they're pretty good on Vlad.

8. His stengths are pretty numerous. He has no mana which means you can spam all your skills as much as you want and just heal up with your Q. His innate makes him incredibly tanky just by building damage. His Q gives him amazing sustain. You can pretty much lane as long as you want with this and with enough CDR it has a 2.4 second cooldown. This coupled with his passive makes him pretty much unkillable. As I said before his pool can dodge almost every spell in the game. His ult amplifies all damage done to the targets including your teammates, DFG active and ignite which gives it a HUGE influence in teamfights if you hit enough people. His build is also very flexible like I said. If you're dying a lot then you can buy health items which still give him damage due to his innate. Almost every AP item and health item are viable on him (except for the ones that give mana regen and mana).

9 & 10. As for his playstyle it can vary depending on your lane opponent. Most of the time you can be pretty agressive and hit your opponent with a Q and some auto attacks everytime they go for a last hit since you're probably gonna be laning against a melee top. Also his range and pool let him farm pretty safely if you're getting zoned. You're Q should also keep you from getting too low and can heal you up so don't be afraid to take a bit of harass. Once you hit lv 6, get your stacks of Tides up and then harass your lane opponent to about 50-60% hp. Wait for the right moment and Ult, Ignite, Q, E and auto attack to finish them off. Remember to use your ult first to maximize your damage. Even if they manage to run away your ignite and ult should finish them.

11. Well, he kinda has both. His ult gives him substantial burst, his E stacks have an insane base damage at max stacks but since his cooldowns are so low he also has quite good sustained damage. You can also for for more burst with Lichbane (which works surprisingly well on him) and DFG, both of which are affected by his ult.