check on the reddit post I made on this if you're a irelia main, or even like the champion!
Honestly, I preferred original Irelia before the rework - her kit was fine the way it was. However, as always, Riot had to say "BUT SHE NEEDS FLASHY SHINY NEW ABILITIES!" and proceeded to turn her into...something. Constantly nerfed/buffed/nerfed, they seem to have no idea what they really want her to be - one second her abilities do the most damage, the next its her auto attacks.
Here's a crazy idea, how about letting the players decide what they want? Might help. I see all this "our vision for the game" crap all the time, well if you have nobody playing League it won't matter very much! New Irelia is far weaker, pre-rework she countered Yi and now he counters her. Frankly, I'd be comfortable using Irelia top with the pre-rework knowing what she can do, but this one is far too weak from the start - constantly nerfing her and changing your mind on her "identity" is going to ruin her even worse.
Take presence of mind on irelia. Your ult cooldown is reduced by 10% per kill/assist. Considering irelia is more useful with ult then w/o it's a very good rune on her, and makes you able to work with the changes they gave to her.
I didnt like it. She is not a new champion, she is Irelia. Her theme might be the blade dancer bs but what matters is her gameplay. She was and SHOULD be an AA duelist like prerework. PAtch 8.15 made her dueling and laning finally decent, she is similar to how she was prerework.
You're not the only one. She's getting needlesly hard to play cause you just can't engage until your passive is fully stacked anymore. And it's not super easy to stack in early game when your Q does 0 dmg.
I decided to watch some challengers and pro players to see how they handled the changes and it looks like she requires riddiculous amount of skill only to let her opponent live with 10 hp after you applied ignite... It happened in around 10 games and then I ran out of OTPs from my server that still played Irelia :O
She was unique before 8.15 and had tools to come back after going 0/2 in lane. Now the latter is still likely to happen but the teamfight potential is gone. If Riot wants Irelia top lane so bad then maybe she should at least get her stun back so that she could throw in an extra auto and actually kill her target?
Let's compare Irelia's current stun ability to other top laners :
-Camille - point and click, 1 sec stun with quite impressive range, -Fiora - conditional 1 sec stun on skillshot, -Riven - 0,75 sec stun (once she's already in aa range to the target) -Irelia - 0,75 sec stun on telegraphed skillshot which is gone the moment she hits her target with Q
It doesn't give her much dueling potential. It worked well as a marking skill while she still had some dmg on her abilities. Now it's a CS tool that's useful when you need to run away or jump on a jungle creep. When you actually start to land it it's even worse cause Lee Sin syndrome kicks in and more often than not you just get killed fighting 4 people and realise you should play Kled instead...
