Theoretical Irelia buffs to practice my balancing & gauge community reaction.
tl;dr: Convienently linked change log in Surrender & 20 format right above this line of text, additional link here. I am NOT asking for a buff, I'm just practicing my balancing because I enjoy game design & like to experiment with changes like these.
First of all (to avoid the immense amounts of hate I may get for these theoretical changes) these would NOT make Irelia broken to the point where she had to effectively be gutted in 8.13. She was WAY stronger back then & the changes I've put forth would bring her up in power, just not to the point where she'd be reaching absurd levels of broken like on her release. Irelia's changelog for context (Select History and scroll all the way down to 'Patch History').
Now, allow me to explain each change in brief detail (and please, look at the changes before saying 'oh I don't want her buffed at all she's OP' - that isn't productive in the slightest. Final link to changelog here.
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**Passive buff: ** Okay, if you looked at the math portion of the changelog (or at least the very bottom row of it) you can see that I stressed as badly as I could that **this is actually pretty damn minor. ** Increasing the Bonus AD ratio by 1-5% (depending on passive stacks) still doesn't really do a lot unless you get a lot of AAs in (which is exactly what I was going for). The reason I'm even bothering with this buff is because (after having played her extensively in 70+ Nexus Blitz games to try her out) I think that she needs more tank shred capability due to her true damage having been removed from her kit by the rework. This change is here to accomplish that & to ensure that she doesn't fall into potential obscurity should a tank meta arise. It also rewards an Irelia player for snowballing/scaling & guarantees her a (slightly) stronger presence in the mid-late game.
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W power shift: This is the most important change. Long story short I'm looking to open up opportunities to punish Irelia more in lane & compensating by giving her more durability in the mid-late game. The cooldown change gives opponents more room to work around by weakening Irelia's trades (she uses W to negate a LOT of damage early on & not having it off CD means she can't trade as much or if she does it'll be much riskier) & hits the Irelia player harder if they fall behind & can't gain levels/CDR. All in all I consider this fair, especially since to reach the original max damage reduction her W used to have at max rank (65%) it would take 300 Bonus AD (and it'll take her a while to get that much).
- At the same time this change should have players returning to W max. E max (which is currently preferred) increases Irelia's burst pattern & makes her more of a 'two shot' champ on squishies when she's ahead, something I'm looking to tone down since no one seems to like all the burst in the game as of late. You can argue that with enough passive procs (both by Qs & AAs) that the burst will be about the same but that's only if she's managed to procure enough bonus AD to make up for the base damage she lost by not maxing E, something which I doubt will happen until after about after two items (better if she's ahead, worse if she's behind).
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R change: Something a little extra which I added on at the end. The basic idea of this was to make it (once again) easier to deal with an Irelia early but harder late. This is probably the only change that in retrospect I'd probably change since nerfing the R slow at rank 1 is both pretty damn negligible & it's pointless to hit her further after nerfing her W cooldown (she's already in a good spot as it is, no need to gut her again). \
- If I had to keep this change the scaling would be 65/70/75% solely to make it more punishing to walk through the blades in an attempt to escape while also maintaining her early game strength.
Conclusion: In the end I did this both to practice balance changes and to see how the community would react to my attempt to make Irelia stronger when played right & worse when played wrong. I'm a very huge advocate of high skill caps & punishing poor play & these changes reflect that. So, I leave it to you to comment & preferably not treat me like I'm insane just because I want to try something out. I know she's in a good state right now, I'm not asking for a buff - I'm just doing this to see how people would react to THIS kind of buff IF it ever happened.