Alright, I've done some thinking and here's what I've come up with.
I clearly did not handle this well on Twitter, and I apologize for that. As far as the Tweet? I was not upset in the least; she was on my team and I wasn't anywhere near the fight. In fact I did dragon while she basically killed their team. It is difficult to describe the situation in 140 characters or whatever Twitter allows; it was pretty ridiculous. I thought I did a good job of showing that I was not upset but more surprised/sad at the manuever, but clearly I underestimated how much it would be analyzed and I will try to be more careful in the future.
However certain issues do bother me about Irelia which are more core to her kit than numerical in nature. Mostly, the issue boils down to her being a tank assassin carry, which is a role that I do not believe should exist in general. I don't so much feel like she's overpowered, as that she's problematic. Few champions have as robust a kit as she does.
She has greater sustain levels than most champions, between her W passive and R heal.
She has immense resistance to CC, greater than most champions, between her passive and Q.
She has great burst damage between her abilities and Trinity Force (I do believe some of this issue comes from TF being a little too strong most likely, or at least the Sheen proc portion of it).
She has a hard disable on E, though not 100% reliable. The slow is also pretty good though.
None of these are necessarily problematic in and of themselves but in combination you end up with a highly-CC resistant tank with a reliable jump mechanism and high burst damage that can sustain themselves, especially nasty for carries but tough for anyone to do anything about. This is simply a very difficult champion to balance for because of the lack of counterplay on the receiving end, in all phases of the game. Certain issues like ease of farming under a turret make this worse, for sure.
I actually like Irelia quite a bit; she's one of my favorite champions. Fighters/tanky DPS in general are my favorite class to play, so I don't feel like I in particular, nor we as a group, have been biased against them. Here are the changes coming for Irelia:
Bladesurge mana cost changed to 60/65/70/75/80 from 70.
This change is to spread out the mana cost a bit. It doesn't feel good at 1, and it is too cheap at 5. Overall a pretty minor adjustment.
Transcendent Blades damage reduced to 80/120/160 from 85/135/185
People bag on her ultimate for dealing little damage, but it is actually one of the most damaging ultimates in the game. 360-740 base damage by rank, 2.4 bonus AD scaling and 2.0 AP scaling, additively. Yes this is assuming you hit all 4 shots, but it's a super fast missile and it's AoE - it's not particularly tough to hit at least one specific target with all 4 shots. Only Absolute Zero and Death Lotus have this type of large base damage plus scaling, and both are much easier to disrupt. The cooldown on Transcendent Blades is also pretty low as far as ultimates go, and it heals you too.
This change partially is aimed at encouraging her to buy a little more damage gear. Like other tradeoffs for fighter types, we wanted to maintain high scaling with lower base damage to allow for more counterplay against her (if she doesn't get terribly farmed, she'll have to choose more between damage and tankiness) and to allow her to carry hard (with good scaling). It's also just to bring it down to the damage level of comparable ultimates.
I think it's also worth noting that Jarvan, Gangplank, and Rumble are also receiving comparable nerfs (in terms of 'strength'). Hopefully this will both shed more information into what's going on and why we are choosing to make the (not terribly large) adjustment we are.
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