I am a mid MMR player that focuses on a very high pressure style of jungling, playing champions like Vi, Elise, and Dr. Mundo. I maintain a high win rate with Vi (75% as of right now) and I wanted to share what I found is effective with the community.

This is a no-brainer. You need this spell for buff and objective control. After they reduced the cool down on smite to 40 seconds you get a lot more uses from it on your first few clears, helping you farm much better than you could in Season 3. Not having Smite is a BAD IDEA.

I don't think there are any other Viable (forgive me for that) summoner spells on Vi in the jungle. You don't need more damage (looking at you Ignite junglers), Teleport isn't useful in teamfights, and Ghost doesn't do as much for a tank as it does a split push champion like Master Yi.

These are the standard runes that I take on Vi. The flat AD marks and quintessences help your early game damage a lot (thanks to your good AD ratios) as well as help you clear the jungle very quickly. Armor seals are a must for junglers who don't want to die to wight, and scaling MR glyphs help you scale into mid game without having to buy any MR before your Aegis of the Legion

I will be experimenting with other rune set ups (namely taking attack speed marks instead) to see if it improves your early clear times before you buy Spirit of the Ancient Golem.

After spending a little time playing with 9-21-0 masteries and the 21-9-0 masteries that XJ9 uses before settling on the 13-17-0 masteries I currently use. I thought that the 21-9-0 masteries weren't that great because you just blew up in team fights. I liked the 9-21-0 masteries, but it felt like you were wasting points on Tenacious and Legendary Guardian since you already built tons of survivability and had tenacity from your Spirit of the Ancient Golem. I found that the Dangerous Game mastery was exceptionally strong on Vi. Since you would usually be assassinating enemy carries, Dangerous Game would usually give you just enough hp to escape.

Simply put, you don't need it. Your skills have high enough base damage to kill pretty much anything if you hit it a few times. As a caster style champion Vi benefits much more from CDR than she does from pure damage. I've been using this build on Vi since I thought it up and started playing her in late Season 3. It gives you high defensive stats, improves your diving ability, and 40% CDR so you can spam Vault Breaker and Relentless Force at enemy carries.

While you can always go for one or two big damage items like Black Cleaver or a Maw of Malmortius in solo queue ( Vi's AD ratios are quite high), I designed this build for being your team's primary tank in competitive play. To anyone who thinks Vi can't be built as a pure tank, Copenhagen Wolves' Amazing used this same build during his LCS Promotion tournament series against Meet Your Makers. Copenhagen Wolves is now a full LCS team. This build just works.

Vi's passive, Blast Shield is an extremely underrated tool in her kit, and is probably the biggest reason to build her like Olaf - tanky with high CDR. Every time you hit an enemy with an activated ability Vi generates a shield that can withstand 10% of her maximum health (397 damage at lv18 with this build), and can be refreshed every 8 seconds at level 12 and on. Just like Riven you can get a much large amount of effective health if you pace your abilities in a teamfight to proc as many shields as possible. Unlike Riven, however, your shield scales off of your maximum health, not your damage. HEALTH & CDR > RAW DAMAGE.

You max your skills in this order because it gives you the best amount of utility and burst damage for securing kills and ganking successfully. While you get more DPS and would probably clear much faster going R > Q > W > E, you'll rarely get the chance to proc the third auto attack from Denting Blows on a target before they cc you or run away. Since you should focus on ganking and not farming, this skill sequence is pretty useless unless all your lanes are perma-pushed (which is when you should try and countergank huehue).

Vault Breaker: This is Vi's bread and butter skill. It provides the best damage and utility out of all your skills, and is also your only form of cc before unlocking your ultimate. Take this at level 2 and max it first to pressure the enemy jungler to gank more often, and then punish them by counter ganking or stealing important buffs and objectives.

Denting Blows: This is what makes Vi such a powerful duelist at all points of the game. If you can hit two auto attacks on an enemy and land a Vault Breaker they're gonna have a bad time. However, because the first point in Denting Blows gives you the best increase to damage and attack speed (the armor reduction is a flat 20% across all levels) you take it to start the jungle at level one and max it last.

Excessive Force: This skill is what helps Vi have such a large amount of burst damage even without any AD items. You should primarily use this skill as an auto attack reset to proc your Denting Blows faster (its a pain to get the third hit otherwise) and to execute champions just outside of your auto attack range.You max this skill second to make better use of Denting Blows and burst down champions you are ganking/diving onto.

Assault and Battery: Everyone's favorite skill on Vi. Due to it's extremely high damage and long suppression time this skill is what lets Vi delete enemy carries from the game. As your ultimate skill you want to level it every time it is available to reach the max 450 base damage, and reduce the cool down timer so you can use it more often. No brainer there!

This section is all about the little mechanical tips and tricks that you can use to improve your Vi play. Utilizing these simple skills is very important in the difference between a good Vi player, and a great Vi player. Topics covered include:

EFFECTIVE ITEMIZING

EFFECTIVE ITEM USE