Irelia, Will of the Blades

P - Equilibrium

• Irelia's abilities are given additional effects when the target is at a higher health percentage than her or when there are 2 or more enemy champions and no allied champions within 1200 units of her.

Q - Bladesurge - Cooldown: 15 seconds, Cost: 50/60/70/80/90 mana

• Active Irelia dashes to the target enemy, dealing 10 +100% AD (+4/5/6/7/8% of the target's missing health) physical damage and applying on-hit effects. If Bladesurge kills the enemy, the cooldown is reset and half the mana cost is refunded.
• Equilibrium bonus: Bladesurge grants Irelia 20/25/30/35/40% tenacity for 3 seconds and the base cooldown of Bladesurge is reduced to 5 seconds.

W - Hiten Style - Cooldown: 20 seconds, Cost: 50 mana

• Passive: Irelia's basic attacks passively deal 5/15/25/35/45 (+10% AD)(+5% AP) bonus on-hit magic damage.
• Active: For the next 5 seconds, Hiten Style's on-hit magic damage is dealt as true damage instead.
• Equilibrium bonus: Hiten Style's remaining duration is refreshed to 2 seconds for each successful basic attack versus enemy champions.

E - Precision Strike - Cooldown: 10 seconds, Cost: 40/50/60/70/80 mana

• Active: Irelia's next basic attack within 4 seconds slows the enemy by 40/50/60/70/80% for 1 second and deals 5/10/15/20/25% AD bonus physical damage. This ability resets Irelia's auto attack timer.
• Equilibrium bonus: Precision Strike stuns the enemy for 0.7/0.9/1.1/1.3/1.5 seconds instead.

R - Transcendent Blades - Cooldown: 100/80/60 seconds, Cost: 100 mana

• Active: Irelia gains the ability to fire her spirit blades floating above her for the next 8 seconds. Each blade deals 40/60/80 (+80% AD)(+50% AP) physical damage to enemies hit. Each spirit blade that does not hit an enemy champion refunds 5 seconds of the base cooldown.
• Equilibrium bonus: Transcendent Blades heals Irelia for 50% of the damage dealt (reduced to 25% against non-champions) plus 1/3/5% of her missing health if it hits an enemy champion.

Small breakdown of the changes:

• Why change Irelia? Her kit is old and many would argue that she feels low counterplay to opponents and somewhat binary to play as the Irelia player. In addition to her mechanics (or lack of), her damage is strong as a mid game champion with her signature "Triforce into full tank" build, but beyond that she scales poorly and after a certain point is transformed into a tanky stun bot should she be forced to teamfight, or a mediocre duelist with a slow splitpush should she be forced to split. I'm hoping this theoretical rework will fix most of these issues... but really this was put together because I had nothing better to do.

• Why change Irelia's passive? Because it's too simple and making it empower her abilities based on if she's at a disadvantage makes her have a much stronger "fair duelist" thematic that I think Riot intended for her. Whether you're a ranged champion poking her down, an assassin/duelist getting the drop on her, or a jungler looking to gank her... be ready for her to strike back with increased power!

• Why change Irelia's Q? Percent missing health synergizes with her existing cooldown reset attribute which would empower her to use the ability easier in situations where you're trying to get a reset to be able to use the ability again while not adding too much base damage to her kit. Aside from that, her new Q has an increased mana cost while farming (to make easy farming more costly on her part since it costs more mana) and it's cooldown being lowered early to allow more uptime when escaping from ganks or trading with ranged opponents. The Equilibrium bonus gives Irelia more uptime on her Q if it's used correctly to make more flashy plays jumping between champions and minions while also being more punishing if it's not used correctly. This should make Irelia feel far less binary to play and play against.

• Why change Irelia's W? Irelia's W previously gave two things: sustain and static true damage. The damage portion it previously gave was problematic for three reasons: one it gave her an extremely strong powerspike with a bit of attack speed and multiple points in her W. Two, that it was useless later in the game as 75 true damage doesn't do that much to squishies let alone health-stacking tanks. Three, that Irelia does next to nothing in the window that it's on cooldown. Changing it the way I did feels like I fixed all three issues. It has a lower base damage although it constantly does some sort of damage while it's on cooldown, as well as it now scales fairly well. So if you opt for either an attack speed or high AD type build, your on-hit damage will hurt both mid game and late game. To explain the Equilibrium bonus, the ability was changed to have an even longer cooldown than before. This emphasizes that if you're beating an opponent in 1v1 you will have a normal 5 second burst of true damage and then it ends. In the case of your opponent is consistently higher health because they are doing more damage than you/stacking health or in a 2v1 and thus constantly at an advantage, you will "permanently" have an edge with unlimited on-hit true damage.

• Why change Irelia's E? Arguably the most complained about component of her kit was changed mostly to reflect that fact. The base magic damage of the ability was removed both because a magic ability didn't fit well in her kit and the auto attack reset she is given instead does perfectly. Compared to before, the player should feel more obligated to make a choice between always saving it solely to stun your opponent and using it when it's most advantageous to her damage output. (think: do I want two instant BoRK %health procs at the beginning of a fight or do I need to save it to stun Pantheon out of his E?) This combined with the increased cooldown at all stages of the game plus the decreased maximum (and minimum) duration of the stun should make this ability feel significantly more healthy to play against.

• Why change Irelia's R? This ability is the least changed overall, since well, I didn't feel like it needed to be too much. The cooldown reduction attribute was added to permit players to use the ability for waveclear without making the cooldown too short if you're using it to fight, making its overall pushing power a decision to make while not gimping your ability to fight afterwards for as long as before. The base damage of the ability compared to before was lowered slightly to favor mid and late game damage-heavy builds while also still giving it utility if you opt to use it for waveclear or a heavier burst in healing. With the removal of Hiten Style's on-hit healing, this ability was compensated (when Equilibrium applies) with over twice as strong healing between a percentage of the damage dealt and Irelia's missing health.

This concludes my enduring post about a theoretical Irelia rework. I was going to go over item builds, matchups, etc but my fingers are starting to hurt and I am hungry. I didn't spend much time thinking about the numbers of her scalings or cooldowns too much since there are too many balance factors to think about, this was supposed to mostly just paint an image of how Irelia could change to be more healthy/less binary all while keeping her identity and what makes her fun in tact.

Pls no flame