well, you can STILL be safe and engage with a 1 second cooldown. its just that an instant-one-screen gapcloser is a bit too much, even if its situational. or if you want to keep the full reset, please give it some sort of travel time like yasuo. no counterplay sucks, theres no reason to defend that.
and hiten style is strong, sure, but what exactly is your problem with it? i still dont get it. the damage isnt high enough to complain about it and other champions have even stronger steroids. her true damage gets "countered" by attackspeed slows and hp and she has no other big damage abilities or steroids. its really her only means of DPS.
sure, turning it into magic damage probably wont hurt her laning phase much, but she will have more trouble with tanks later on and that is a bad thing. she SHOULD be somewhat good against tanks. also, why would it sync well with trinity? right now, it has no scaling and it probably wouldnt get any scaling just because you make it magic damage.
and sure, if you turn it on at a good time, you deserve to get some benefit from it. if your opponent isnt brain-afk or afk for real, he will probably take 3-5 auto attacks which is 225-375 true damage. thats not THAT much for a 15-second cooldown ability, even tho its true damage. the real power of hiten style comes later when she has about 3 items and gets to attack more often in the duration.
my only real problem with hiten style is that its passive doesnt turn off as long as its on cooldown, because thats too much of a failsafe. if you waste your powerspike, you should have a powerdrop afterwards.
if we compare it to master yis wuju style:
similar cooldown
master yi on max level has +10% total AD and 30+22%AD true damage. this is MUCH lower than irelias true damage before stacking up some items. later on it is as high as about 100 true damage on hit, tho you need to build for that too, which limits yi's buildpaths.
irelia has 13 hp restored per hit as passive and 75 true damage aswell as 26 health restored on hit while active, both of these have absolutely no scaling except with attackspeed, so irelia can build basically whatever she wants. now you can argue that its better than master yis wuju style because yi has an attackspeed steroid that synergizes with his wuju style and irelia has not, but thats really no reason to not turn off her passive while on cooldown.
okay, letd get back to topic: irelias problem isnt her insane true damage, its her lack of counterplay. this is taken due to the instantness of her Q and the unavoidable super long target stun.
this means, her stun needs to get some form of counterplay at least by having lower stun duration and more cooldown and her Q needs counterplay by either having 1 second cooldown or not being instant.
also, another argument i have vs magic damage on her hiten style: currently, building ninja tabi vs irelia is cool because most of her damage is physical and comes from auto attacks, tho if you want to have any chance to actually FIGHT with her, you need merc treads to not get taken out of the game by her stun forever. this means, even tho tabis are statistically better, you need the mercs 100% to even be able to play, but since they give magic resist, it would at the same time be a nice counter to her hiten style, which in return would nerf her even more.
