Formerly OP #12: Old Vladimir

Every other champion in the game had to choose between hurting you and surviving you. Vladimir bought both with the same gold.

He had no mana bar, no cast time worth dodging, and two seconds of being genuinely impossible to target. The rest was arithmetic.

Formerly OP

Old Vladimir

Season 1 · Ended Patch 6.9

Every other champion in the game had to choose between hurting you and surviving you. Vladimir bought both with the same gold.

He had no mana bar, no cast time worth dodging, and two seconds of being genuinely impossible to target. The rest was arithmetic.

Laning against old Vladimir was a waiting room. You couldn't push him out, because he had no resource to burn through. Go all-in and he'd sink into the floor and come back up behind you. Out-scaling him didn't work either, since the health you bought to survive his burst made his burst bigger, and the ability power he bought to burst you also made him harder to kill. Twenty minutes in, the enemy Vladimir was a mage with a bruiser's health bar and nobody could explain which item had done that, because none of them had. His passive had.

When, And For How Long

Vladimir arrived on July 27, 2010 (Patch V1.0.0.97), and Season 1 belonged to him. He was one of the era's real "ban him or deal with it" picks, and unlike most champions on that list he stayed relevant for years afterward without ever fully losing the thing that made him unfair.

His fall didn't come in one patch either. Riot cut the passive down in stages across 2011 and 2012, then finally rebuilt him in Patch 6.9 on May 4, 2016 (part of that year's mid-season mage update). That's close to six years between the problem being identified and the problem being redesigned.

The Old Kit

The icons below are the archived art from the pre-update kit, so that's exactly what the bar looked like.

Passive: Crimson Pact

This one hasn't changed. Crimson Pact [Passive] converts health and ability power into each other, so every item he buys pays him twice.

Q: Transfusion

A point-and-click drain that damaged the target and healed him. That's the entire description, and that's the problem. There wasn't an empowered version of Transfusion [Q] to bait out, or a window to play around. It came up, it worked, it came up again, and every rank made that loop harder to stand in front of.

W: Sanguine Pool

Sanguine Pool [W] did then what it does now: took him out of the game for a couple of seconds and gave the fight back to him on his terms. What's changed is the company it kept. Far fewer champions could go untargetable in that era, so playing around it meant holding your entire combo and guessing.

E: Tides of Blood

The forgotten one, and the strangest. Tides of Blood [E] cost health, sat on a 4.5 second cooldown at every rank, and damaged everything around him. Each cast stacked a buff for the next one, up to four times, raising both the damage and the cost, and separately raising his self-healing, his health regeneration and his spell vamp. So the more he used it, the more it healed him for using it. In a long fight that compounding effect mattered more than the damage did. It was also easy to overlook (it just kept stacking).

R: Hemoplague

Hemoplague [R] survived intact: it's a big delayed area hit that amplifies everything landing on the infected in the meantime, and then as now, the ultimate wasn't the scary part of him.

Why It Was OP

Vladimir's damage was never the outlier. What broke him was that there wasn't much counterplay, and there weren't any windows to actually fight him. He'd ramp up and never slow down.

His damage was too consistent. The whole design language of laning in Season 1 was mana management. You harassed until your bar got low, then you backed off, and that rhythm gave the other laner windows. Vladimir simply didn't participate. Transfusion [Q] didn't cost anything, Sanguine Pool [W] and Tides of Blood [E] cost health that Transfusion [Q] put straight back, and there wasn't a limit on how long he could keep that up. Each level of Q cut the cooldown further, and if you couldn't burst him down he'd just heal forever.

The longer the fight ran, the further ahead he got. Tides of Blood [E] stacked his own healing, spell vamp and regeneration higher every cast. Transfusion [Q] healed him on a very short cooldown. Crimson Pact [Passive] meant his health pool was oversized to start with. Extended teamfights are supposed to punish mages. They rewarded him.

The Fall

Riot went after the passive first, and they went at it slowly.

Patch V1.0.0.101 removed the part of Crimson Pact [Passive] that restored health outright whenever he gained ability power. Patch V1.0.0.111 cut the health-to-ability-power conversion from 4% of bonus health down to 2.5% (a substantial chunk of his damage, removed from a slot he wasn't even leveling). Patch V1.0.0.132, in January 2012, came back for the other side of the loop and reduced the ability-power-to-health conversion from 180% down to 140%. In between, Sanguine Pool [W] lost its on-cast movement speed and had its slow trimmed, and Hemoplague [R]'s amplification came down twice.

None of it changed what he fundamentally was. That took Patch 6.9 on May 4, 2016, which rebuilt him as part of the mid-season mage update. Crimson Pact [Passive] got rebalanced in both directions at once. The health-to-power conversion came back, and the power-to-health return was cut to 100%. Transfusion [Q] gained the Crimson Rush mechanic (the modern rhythm of the champion): two casts charge up a third, empowered one, so the ability finally has a cadence. And Tides of Blood [E] was thrown out entirely and replaced with the charged nova he has today.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Vladimir is still an extremely good champion who's still miserable to lane against, and Crimson Pact [Passive] still converts stats in both directions. Sanguine Pool [W] still gives him two seconds of untargetability, and it still eats ultimates.

What he's lost is the free ride. Transfusion [Q] now has a real rhythm. There are windows where it isn't up, and in those he has to respect you. Tides of Blood [E] costs him a meaningful chunk of health to charge, so his waveclear and his poke both have a real price in an actual resource. The passive's conversion rates sit at numbers that make itemization a decision again rather than a formality. He's a scaling monster who deletes squishy targets after three items (a fair description of a lot of mages). Old Vladimir wasn't a mage. He was a mage and a bruiser at the same time, on one build, for free.

If the part you miss is a Vladimir who doesn't need a lane of his own to be useful, Weird Picks #89 puts him in the support slot, where the sustain does the job a second summoner spell used to.

And for how the free ride got taken apart, Vladimir's patch history has every nerf and buff with the numbers.

Nominate The Next One

The pattern in this series hasn't broken yet. The champions that stayed broken longest had kits that quietly refused to make a trade-off. Big numbers had less to do with it. Vladimir got to skip the single most important decision in the game for six years. Look through the rest of the run below.