level your skills like this:
R>Q>E>W At level 2 make the exception of putting 1 point into W for survival. Your Q skill is a nuke and a heal rolled into 1. Use it to help last-hit mobs, use it to harass enemy heroes. You want solo mid because until you get that Q skill leveled you can be quite vulnerable. At around level 7+ the cooldown is remarkable and you can spam it to heal a lot. Use it to harass at range to slowly pick down the enemy's life. Once they get low set up a gank using Q followed by R then E then W then Q. Most enemies are dead at this point if you harassed them to less than 1/3 max hp. Remember that making an enemy hero leave the lane is also good you dont have to net a kill every single time. Free farming while they are gone getting underleveled and outfarmed will make it easier to gank them in the future. So don't overextend.

Vlad seems to be a little low on the damage but his skills heal him and/or cost hp. Keep this in mind you can focus more on ap/cdr items and don't need mana pool/mana regen AT ALL. He also tends to be a bit more tanky. He also has *3* AoE nukes for team fights making the total burst he does in a team fight actually remarkably high. Play him accordingly.

Hey all. just thought I would post (what I consider to be) a success story.

I've realized that I shouldn't mid lane vlad until I get a bit better with him so I went bot with Jarvan, ashe mid, gallio solo top and trynd jungling. Trynd had never jungled before so he kinda failed but it was all good just a game right?

Jarvan and I were against trynd and morde, which meant we did lots of turret hugging, I kept trying to poke morde with q but he always had his shield health instead of his actual health so after awhile I realized I should be poking trynd instead or wait for morde's shield to go away which increased our lane strength immensely.

It looked like it was gonna be a typical game for a long time with me sitting at around 2-3-8 or so. I eventually got down to 2-5-9 which was good but not really and I was sighing to myself about another below par showing.

WHEN late game happened. They had pushed bot turret and were working on our inhib while all 5 of us were ganking their trynd (he was their most fed player by our jungle trynd so we priotized him) and then we went back to b slaughtered them which got me my 9th assist and 3rd or 4th kill. We pushed them all the way to their nexus turrets but left them standing and all ran away like a co-ordinated team should. We debated going baron but decided against it because we knew our opponents had respawned and would be right behind us. This unfortunately meant that they got baron.

They all hovered outside of our mid inhib turret and acted all threatening with lots of trash talking over chat about how stupid we were for not getting baron. And we were there and it was all about positioning and who would start what would happen. Remembering back (it would be nice to have replays riot) it is hard to say who initiated whether it was me or gallio but the battle was fierce. I ulted on them, got all 5 I believe Q (I think it was on unshielded morde), E and then they all started focussing me when I W got a kill in pool, came back up ignited morde got a kill Q vayne, E got a kill, Q skarner... didn't get a kill (ashe got him) and just when it appeared that blaze (the fire mage I forget his name) had escaped my ult did damage and he died. 4 KILLS in one fight. I was so stoked. It didn't give me a "quadrakill" tho... I dont know why. I think it only gave me a "triple kill".

We proceeded to rush their nexus turrets and nexus without minion assistance.

GG.

I had lots of fun cause I finally got more kills than deaths as vlad 8-5-10. Woot! Once again not a pro score but a sign that maybe I will get this.

My build was
boots, 3 health pots, hextech, rabadons, ionian boots, blasting rod, amp tome
pretty much in that order.

Thx for the help and encouragement