4 years later and Irelia still has the same balance issues

"Our concerns with Irelia lie less with her overall power and more in her fundamental design.

Fighting against Irelia has very little counterplay. The ball always seems to be in her park.

For example:

1. She deals Physical, Magic, and True damage. There is no good way to itemize against her attacks.

2. Her passive makes use of CC on her ineffective.

3. The lifesteal on her ultimate calculates the heal pre-mitigation. This means that even if you build Magic Resist to lower the damage it deals to you, she will still gain life as if you had 0 Magic Resist.

Right now, Irelia's true weakness lies in the fact that she doesn't scale very well with any particular stat but scales with all of them. This is why people are so incentivized to get a Trinity Force or Wit's End and then just build tank because Irelia has very high bases to make up for the lack of scaling.

To give her a more gameplay conducive weakness, we need to push her either more towards the bursty Assassin or more towards the sustained Fighter role. Right now, she is too much of both and it makes playing against her a pain. I know right now we are leaning towards pushing her towards Assassin but that could change."

• RiotStatikk, QA Analyst, via the official forums.

Now tell me, doesn't that sound exactly like the Irelia we have and play against today ? Other then number 3 that was somewhat fixed, all the other problems are still true to this day. Here is a link to the original debate (http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=706081&page=1).