Let's Talk About AP Irelia

Hey, Riot Games (and others), I wanted to have a discussion about AP Irelia. When you first reworked Irelia, you added new AP ratios to her W, E, and R in addition to already existing AD ratios to incentivize some people to play her AP. I absolutely loved this decision, and tried out AP Irelia as soon as it hit the PBE. I noticed while playing it that it was pretty fun and sometimes a very effective way to build her. You seemed to agree and tweaked her ratios to make her less powerful, to be specific, by decreasing her E ratio from 0.9x AP to 0.8x AP and by decreasing her W ratio from 0.5x - 1.0x AP (depending on how long you channeled) to 0.4x - 0.8x AP. Despite these nerfs, I still enjoyed playing AP Irelia and still thought it was pretty good in some situations. Then the patch hit live and soon enough the way more popular AD Irelia dominated and later received nerfs/changes in later patches to keep her in check.

Among a few other ones, the biggest nerfs I want to highlight were the dmg reduction change to her W and the dmg and cooldown nerf to her R. Pre-change her damage reduction for her W scaled from 45%/50%/55%/60%/65% based on level of the ability and it had an additional scaling based off of AP where for each 100 AP you had, you would get an additional 7% damage reduction. So essentially if you had 500 AP you would get 100% dmg reduction on max level of her W. This is one of the reasons I thought AP Irelia was so strong. But when they changed her W dmg reduction to no longer scale by lvl of the ability and instead stay at 50% at each level; this hurt AP Irelia a lot. This meant that the AP required to get 100% dmg reduction during her W was around 715-720 instead of 500, which meant it was a lot harder to achieve. Additionally changes to her ultimate indirectly hurt AP Irelia just as much. The main changes that did this were the dmg for the initial hit being decreased from 150/275/400 based on level to 125/225/325 and the dmg for the second hit being decreased from 125/200/275 to 75/125/175. Additionally her ultimate cooldown was increased from 120/105/90 to 140/120/100. This meant that at lvl 1/2/3 of her R she was losing 75/125/175 base dmg and was gaining 20/15/10 more seconds to her cooldown. You can probably see how this hurt AP Irelia just as hard as AD Irelia if not more. Other nerfs worth noting are the stun duration and slight damage nerf of her E, her range nerf to her E and R, and her W base dmg nerf. The changes to her Q weren't really noticeable for AP Irelia other than making it slightly easier to last hit minions with her Q.

As you can see these changes made to Irelia's kit worked very well in keeping AD Irelia in check, but made the already worse AP Irelia even worse. I understand that these changes were necessary to AD Irelia, but it makes me sad that you guys seemed to have forgotten about AP Irelia. All that I ask is that her AP ratio for her W become 10% for each 100 AP to allow you to get 100% dmg reduction at 500 AP once again, and it would also mean a lot if you were to buff AP Irelia in some other ways without buffing the already strong AD Irelia (like maybe some slight AP ratio buffs for example). After all, the AP ratios were put in there for a reason, so you did want people to play AP Irelia. It really would mean a lot to me and other AP Irelia players out there if you helped AP Irelia out a little. Thanks a bunch for everything that you guys do.