Everybody drops electrics. I drop electrics. The difference between someone who drops them occasionally and someone who drops them constantly isn’t talent — it’s that one of them has actually drilled the timing and the other is hoping.
So here are five drills and concepts that will fix your electrics for good. If you’ve never landed one, you can start today. If you already land them but they fall apart under pressure, tips 3 and 5 are the ones you want.
And stick around for the last section, because there’s an honest conclusion at the end of this that most guides won’t tell you — I measured what these combos actually earn you, and the answer surprised me.
What an electric actually is
An electric comes out of Vi’s sway plus a light, medium or heavy. You can charge it two ways: halfway, which gives you the electrified effect, or fully, which is stronger still.
The one rule that governs everything below
You only ever want the half charge. Not the full one. Every drill on this page, and basically every electric you’ll do for the rest of your time on this character, is a semi-charge.
Get that fixed in your head now, because if you’re sitting on the button waiting for the full charge you will be too slow for every single one of these routes, and you’ll think the timing is broken when actually you’re just holding too long.
1. Slow the game down and look at her arm
Press Start, go to Basic, and find Game Speed. Take it down to 50%.
Now dash in and charge a light or a medium, and watch Vi’s forearm. You’re looking for smoke coming off her elbow and electricity gathering at her fist. That’s your release point. At full speed it’s a blur. At half speed it’s obvious, and once you’ve seen it a few times your hands start to recognise it without your eyes needing to.
Two things people get wrong here
Don’t live in slow motion. This is a demonstration tool, not a practice mode. Stay in it too long and it actively messes up your real timing, because you’re training a rhythm that doesn’t exist at 100%. Look at the cue a handful of times, then put the speed back.
There’s a buffer after her dash. If you dash and immediately mash a button, nothing comes out. That gap catches a lot of people who think their electric input is wrong when actually the dash just hadn’t finished. Give it that beat.
2. The consistency test: how to know you actually did it
This is the first step of every electric you will ever do, and it doubles as your pass/fail check.
Forward S1 → light (no charge at all) → chain into a charged medium.
The timing: as soon as the light connects, you start charging the medium. Not before.
Reading the result
You need two things to be true, and this is what makes it a real test instead of a guess:
- The opponent is electrified — that means your charge was long enough.
- The combo counter shows a 2 on the left — that means it actually combo’d.
Now you can diagnose yourself instead of just feeling bad:
- No electrify? You released too fast. Charge longer.
- Electrified but no combo counter? You released too slow. They recovered.
- Both? That’s the window. Remember how that felt.
That’s the whole skill — finding the happy medium between those two failure modes.
3. Stop watching Vi. Watch your opponent.
This is the tip that changed it for me, and it’s the one most guides skip.
Everyone learns the steam cue on Vi’s arm. It works, but it means your eyes are on your own character while the actual fight is happening. So instead, time it off your opponent’s recovery.
Watch what they do when you hit them: they bend forward, then slowly come back up. You want to release right before they finish recovering — as they’re about to stand fully upright again.
The most precise version of that cue: release right as the opponent is above Vi’s head. That’s a spatial landmark, not a rhythm, which means it survives lag and it survives you being nervous. If you take one timing cue from this entire article, take that one.
4. Five in a row, every day
Here’s the actual homework. Before you queue anything, get five successful electrics in a row. If you miss one, start the count over.
You will be bad at this at first. That’s expected — aim for one or two successes at the start and build up. But do it every single day and by the end of the week your electrics will look completely different.
The repeating-medium variant
Once the basic rep is comfortable, extend it. Forward S1 → light → charged medium → then keep repeating that medium until it drops.
You’ll get roughly three that genuinely combo; on the fourth they hit the ground. That’s normal — the drop is the end of the rep, not a failure. What you’re training is speed, and the two failure modes stay the same: too fast and the electric doesn’t come out at all, too slow and they’re on the floor.
If you only ever start from the medium you’ll get about two solid reps before the third hits the ground. Either version is fine. Five a day.
5. The button-swapping drill (this one’s sneaky)
This was one of the hardest electric routes in the game before the last patch, and it trains something completely different from drill 4.
Forward S1 → light → charged medium → dash → light (semi-charged) → medium. Three of those in a row is one rep. Do five reps.
Why it’s worth the frustration
Drill 4 trains timing on one button. This one trains switching between different buttons at different charge levels, which is a genuinely different skill — it’s the same reason people who mash tend to mash one button. You’re building the ability to control which input comes out under pressure, not just when.
And that pays off outside combos. If you drop something mid-match, you need to know what to do on the fly. If they block, you need to react. Electrics aren’t only combo filler — they show up in block strings too, and that’s where being able to swap buttons cleanly actually wins you rounds.
Putting it together: the current patch combo
Nothing elegant, but it gets the job done and it makes you use every skill above in one sequence:
- Dash forward S1
- Light (no hold)
- Medium — semi-charged
- Heavy — semi-charged
- Dash forward S1 again
- Light — semi-charged this time
- Medium — semi-charged
- Heavy — semi-charged
It ends in Limit Strike and does about half their health. As far as I can tell it’s corner only, so don’t panic if it won’t come out mid-screen.
Think of it as a full-body electric workout rather than a combo you need in your match plan. If you can run this cleanly, every individual drill above is solid.
Now the honest part: I barely use these
If you watch my streams you’ll notice I don’t run these long electric routes. Not because I can’t — because why would I?
I measured it. The new electric combo did 344. My plain bread and butter — two electrics in it, ending in super — did 488. The harder combo does less damage.
Now, that’s not a perfectly clean comparison, and I want to be straight about it: the electric route ends in Limit Strike, which pays you meter and leaves a setup, while the BnB spent a super to hit 488. Those are different resources doing different jobs. But it does kill the idea that the fancy version is the “optimal” one. It isn’t. It’s the harder one.
So drill electrics because they’re fun, because they make you better with your hands, and because block-string reactions genuinely need them. Master them and you will get nice — but be clear-eyed about at what cost. I got to Grandmaster and fought Challenger players on basic combos with a little electric mixed in, not on the crazy routes.
This is the same thing I found when I actually measured Vi’s combo damage in 3 simple Vi mechanics — the gap between the easiest route and the hardest one is far smaller than the difficulty gap. Two separate tests, same conclusion.
Honest caveats
- Slow motion is a diagnostic, not a practice mode. It builds the wrong rhythm if you live in it. Look, learn the cue, go back to 100%.
- The damage comparison isn’t apples to apples. Limit Strike ending versus super ending means different resource outcomes. The takeaway is “the hard route isn’t automatically better,” not “electrics are useless.”
- The patch combo is corner only as far as I’ve tested. Don’t build a mid-screen plan around it.
- Drill 5 was harder before the last patch. Routes move. The drills keep working even when the specific combo stops existing, which is the real reason to learn them as drills rather than as combos.
- Online is not the lab. Timing that’s clean offline gets rougher with lag, which is exactly why the opponent-position cue beats a memorised rhythm.
What to practice this week
- Day one only: drop to 50% speed and watch the steam cue five or six times. Then go back to 100% and never use it again.
- Every day: five successful forward S1 → light → charged medium reps in a row. Check for the electrify and the 2.
- Every day: pick one of the two extended drills — the repeating medium, or the button-swapping one. You don’t need both.
- Every rep: watch the opponent, not Vi. Release as they come above her head.
- End of week: try the full patch combo in the corner and see how it feels. If it’s clean, the drills worked.
If electrics are still too advanced right now, that’s completely fine — go get comfortable with basics first via combo system basics and the Vi guide. And if you’re landing electrics in the lab but never in a match, the problem isn’t your execution, it’s your openings — that’s 7 Vi pressure tools.
The short version
- Semi-charge everything. Never full charge. This is the whole game.
- Slow the game to 50% once to see the smoke on Vi’s forearm, then go back to normal.
- There’s a buffer after her dash — pressing instantly gives you nothing.
- The test rep is forward S1 → light → charged medium. Success = opponent electrified and a 2 on the combo counter.
- No electrify = too fast. No combo counter = too slow.
- Time off your opponent, not Vi — release right as they rise above her head.
- Five successful reps in a row, daily. Miss one, restart the count.
- Two extended drills: repeating medium (speed) and button-swapping (control). Pick one per day.
- Fancy electric route: 344. Simple BnB: 488. Learn electrics for the hands and the block strings, not because they’re optimal.
Still dropping them?
Execution problems are usually the easiest thing to fix on a call, because I can watch your inputs and tell you within a couple of reps whether you’re early or late — which is the thing that’s almost impossible to diagnose alone. Book a session here.
Free route: post a clip in the 2XKO Jungle Discord and I’ll take a look. You can also pair these with the 5 daily drills as a full warm-up, or see where Vi stands on the current tier list.
