This is a Day 1 guide to give you something to start with, once VI is released. Since Slater covered the jungle aspect, I wrote a Top Lane guide, depicting some strategies and a general build idea. Feel free to comment and give feedback and ideas to improve this guide until we have approved and featured ones.

VI is an aggressive AD Bruiser. Her Kit gives her high offensive mobility and some durability but above all, insane damage. Her CC although is just mediocre - one has-to-be-charged - knockback and an ultimate 1,25s knockup.

Therefore your role is: picking out single dangerous targets, bully their carries and burst people down. Vi isn't optimal for a tank.

In my opinion, there are only 2 effective ways to play Vi. The first one (and more compelling for me) is the offensive approach: put 21 points in offense to destroy enemies fast and thorough, getting some basic defense as well.
The second one will be explained below.

Tier 1
Summoner's Wrath: 5 additional AD and AP on your igniterespectively reduced MR and armor on your exaustshould add a slight edge that may make a difference in some cases.
Fury: to get your Denting Blows rolling and basically improving your sustained damage.
Sorcery: more spells mean more damage and more Blast Shield.

Tier 3
Weapon Expertise: pretty obvious. All of your damage is physical so 8% armor penetration will help you apply that.
Havoc: percentage damage is a pretty obvious choice as well. Best choice to get to past tiers.

Tier 4
Brute Force simply adds more dps on both styles and auto-attacks.

Tier 5
Vi does not make great use out of critical strikes, hence we skip 10% critical damage (Lethality) and the AS buff after crits (frenzy). The AP masteries won't help that much since only Excessive Force has an AP scaling on it.
Butcher won't pay off except for laning and pushing and putting points in there sacrifices teamfight potential and damage versus champions.

Tier 6
The reason why we are putting so many points in that tree: about 2-3% more overall damage on your targets, especially in the crucial phase when someone gets low. Crucial choice in my eyes.

In case you need more durability and your team lacks people that can take a few hits - or if you have to go def against your lane.

Tier 1
Durability: more HP means more shields through Blast Shield More HP contributes better to every armor and MR you get.

Tier 2
Hardiness and Resistance both increase your early game survivability. Hardiness is even more important, since it increases your defense versus turrets and minions (and dragon).

Tier 3
Veteran's Scars: Same as for Durability. More HP is always desirable on a bruiser, especially with such a passive.
Unyielding: get a point and leave it there. It's just a tiny bit more defense but the impact is minmal. However, don't take 2/2 or Safeguard, Block (T4) or Relentless, because you need the points for other masteries that have a greater influence on your performance.

Tier 4
Tenacious: Vi is melee, CC'd melees deal less damage in most scenarios where they are rooted or slowed - in opposite to mages or ranged DPS. Therefore making you as mobile as possible and decreasing CC effectivity as much as you can is valuable.
Juggernaut is extremely nice for you since it scales greatly with your Blast Shield - like durability and Veteran's Scars.

Tier 5
Defender gives you 1-5 armor and magic resistance. That does not sound much, but it may give you an edge in early and mid game, it's item independent and it adds more defense per mastery point than legendary armor.
Legendary Armor: at first glance it might sound great, but even with 3/3 your armor and magic resistance wil increase only by an amount of ~5-10 (10 in case you got 200 armor/MR), which is not that huge. Since percentage penetration decreases that effect even further, you mind even take a point into good hands (nice in late game) and/or Reinforced armor to counter AD carries or Pantheon/Gankplank/Tryndamere.

Tier 6
3% damage reduction is just too good to pass up. This increases the worth of every inch defense and HP that you get and let's you escape with a sliver of health sometimes. Or frustrating enemies aiming at you even further ("Why won't she lose HP?").

Tough Skin/Bladed Armor: not worth the points we need elsewhere, become useless later in the game unless farming and if you make use of it, you are probably pushing already.
Perseverance does not really make a difference and soaks up points we could use elsewhere.
Summoner's resolve: without taking Ghost/Heal/Barrier/Smite,you won't need it - and that you'll use one of the above is highly unlikely.


I guess, whatever masteries you take, you should be fine without speccing into mana / mana regen. Summoner Spell CDR may come in handy in a few cases, but over all, some durability is just fine for VI. The rest gives you stats which increase your damage by a huge amount, especially armor penetration and %-damage.

There are a few runes that might be possible to run, my favorite is always highlighted, my second choices are like that.

Marks and Quints:

AD is plain effective due to her great scaling in almost every aspect. Every spell benefits from it and auto-attacks deal more damage. Best scaling.
Attack Speed increases your damage via Denting Blows and auto-attacks, but at the cost of extra damage on Vault Breaker,Excessive Force and Assault and battery.
*armor penetration should be inferior due to Vi's great scaling, but in some extreme cases it might be worth taking some extra armor off your enemy. Consider maxing Denting Blows in this case, since it is % damage and does not depend on AD that much.

Quints:

life steal can help you sustain in your lane in case you get counterpicked and/or having a hard time to farm. It costs you some decent early game damage though, but these runes get even better over the course of the game.

Seals:

usual choice should be armor: provide the highest effect on the field, making it easier to tank minions/turrets early on and especially trading with your lane. Get them when your lane deals mostly physical damage.
HP/level in case your lane and/or whole enemy team lacks AD damage but also % damage.

Glyphs:

in most cases you should get magic resistance / level. They surpass the flat ones at level 9, and since you are on a solo lane, they pay off pretty fast.
In some extreme matchups it might be worth getting flat MR runes instead to help your laning and/or enemy jungle ganks. However, those occasions should be rare.
Enemies really lack AP damage: get attack speed to help your Denting Blows stacks to apply earlier.