Vladimir

Vladimir has been shaping Noxus from the shadows since the empire’s earliest days, which is longer than it should be possible for anyone to live — a fitting kind of staying power in an empire that measures worth by strength of any kind. Hemomancy is the reason: blood magic that has unnaturally extended his own life and given him a level of control over other people’s minds and bodies that rivals his control over his own.

That control takes two very different forms depending on where he’s standing. Among Noxus’s high society, he has gathered devoted followers who orbit him without ever quite grasping why, mistaking manipulation for charisma. Away from the aristocracy, in the city’s poorer, harder streets, the same gift turns considerably more direct: whoever crosses him simply loses their blood to him instead. LeBlanc, a fellow member of the Black Rose, moves through comparable circles of influence, if not by comparable methods.

His kit runs on that same blood economy, and on a resource entirely his own rather than ordinary mana. Transfusion steals life from a target and, once his Crimson Rush bar fills, briefly turns into one of the strongest last-hitting tools in the game; Sanguine Pool drops him into an untargetable pool that slows and siphons anyone standing in it, and is most costly to him if an opponent forces him into it early; Tides of Blood spends his own health to charge a damaging burst that enemy units can block; and Hemoplague, his ultimate, marks an area for increased damage before detonating for a hit that heals him for every champion it caught, which makes killing him before it goes off far more effective than waiting it out. His passive, Crimson Pact, ties bonus health and ability power together so tightly that stacking either one quietly makes him more dangerous, though items built to punish health stacking tend to cut that engine off at the source.