Recently Alice and I have switched our
priority from focusing on trying out new champions and testing
Dominion out back to trying out Classic games however that is proving
more difficult than we thought but we're still focusing on that
primarily rather than Dominion. However I managed to make some time
for practicing Irelia in Dominion as well when Alice isn't able to
play.
I first had the idea to try her out a
long time ago before I knew a lot about the game and I wanted to
switch to a melee champion rather than trying out various ranged
champions, and she was the most appealing to me as her outfit wasn't
very risque, and I hardly ever saw her in action. I ended up not
purchasing her however and instead I bought cheaper champions to try
out. Actually I think I just bought Akali instead, what actually
happened escapes me at the moment. However, since then I still didn't
really see much of Irelia in Classic mode, I think I only saw her
once or twice in fact, but that changed when Dominion came out. I'm
pretty sure the first Dominion game I played when it was still in the
open Beta phase, had someone playing Irelia in it, as well as a few
of the games after that. The Irelia trend continued onto nowadays and
while I see her less frequently, she is still around quite often in
Dominion, and far more than she is in Classic.
This week, or rather the last week now,
had Irelia as one of the free champions in the rotation and I decided
to try her out, I first practiced using her in a custom match with
just me and bots just so I could get used to her abilities and how
she would perform with a full item build. During that I also decided
to mess around to see her death animation which I read about, which
is actually probably one of the most shocking deaths in the game,
similar to Trynadamere's. Back onto the main point however, I started
off with using a Mobafire build that used :
-Mercury’s Treads
-Trinity Force
-Force of Nature
-Shurelya's Reverie
-Randuin's Omen
-Guardian Angel
I personally thought that it both made
sense and was completely otherworldly. For supporting it, based off
of her skill set, she is very much centered around having DPS, and
more durability than most other Assassins do, while other Assassins
have extra damage skills whereas Irelia has a passive healing ability
through her Hiten Style, and a sort of damaging healing skill through
Transcendent Blades. So in short, due to her additional survivability
and already good damage, all of the defensive oriented items would
compliment that.
Against the build however is the fact
that she is still a damage dealer and not a tank, Trinity Force is
literally the only item in the build that increases her damage, and
while it does do that, it also naturally spreads all of it's
effectiveness into all stats including additional defensive ones,
which, with all of the other defensive items, I doubt she is in dire
need of.
When I tried this build out in Dominion
I wasn't able to make any item after the Trinity Force pretty much
because the game ended so quickly, although I'm sure that with a more
complete build it would be much more viable than I saw it was, I need
to do more testing on that in the future.
Back on track however, I found out a
few things about Irelia in that custom game, one is that she does
quite a bit of burst damage even with the survivability build, two is
that her auto attacking damage even with Hiten Style is nearly
nonexistent with that build, and three, Irelia's abilities seem to be
focused on being able to get into the fight quickly and then unlike
other champions, it doesn't really have a clear path from then on,
she can lock enemies down but only if they're at higher health than
her, she can heal off enemies and hit multiple targets with her
Transcendent Blades, and finally she can of course, just auto attack
away. All of these things and trying out the defensive build in a
Dominion match led me to believe that another build is in order, one
with more offense.
I found that quickly too of course,
just below a few of the more popular guides which had the
survivability build which does make me think that it's viable
somehow, probably much more in Classic mode than Dominion. In any
case however, this is the offensive build, and the build that I'm
currently liking and using the most.
-Mercury’s Treads or Ninja Tabi
depending on enemy team composition
-Trinity Force
-Stark's Fervor
-Infinity Edge
-Banshee's Veil/Odyn's Veil
-Phantom Dancer or Guardian Angel or
the Black Cleaver or Hextech Revolver
For Dominion I personally switched it
around to this order, with a slight modification in items.
-Mercery's Treads or Ninja Tabi
-Trinity Force
-Infinity Edge
-Defensive item based on enemy team
(usually I ended up getting a Randuin's Omen)
-Stark's Fervor
-Hextech Gunblade
Of course, I hardly was able to get
past the Infinity Edge in most cases, gold always seems to be a
problem in Dominion and I need to figure out if that's possible to
rectify somehow, maybe through minion farming. In any case however,
the Infinity Edge allows Irelia to be a very good auto attacker after
charging into battle, everything else that's different from the
survivability build such as Stark's Fervor or Hextech Gunblade is
designed to work with Irelia's healing ability, which requires her to
be in melee combat anyway, so adding more life steal or spell vamp
even increases her healing ability even more. The survivability build
however is much tougher than this build, although this build in most
cases allows Irelia to win 1v1s easily, and with a good team backing
her up, she can easily win more numerous fights as well with her high
burst and locking down abilities, at the very least at least 90% of
the time if you target someone who isn't very durable like a Ranged
Carry, they'll die in split seconds as is the goal of all Assassin
characters.
Anyways it is difficult to build upon
Irelia's character because her skill set allows her to do multiple
things but none of them exceedingly well, such as how Trynadamere's
abilities allow him to be a better auto attacker along with
survivability, or how LeBlanc's skillset is focused on doing high
magical damage burst with some escaping power. Irelia on the other
hand as Hiten Style which allows her to auto attack more effectively,
Bladesurge which is a good farming tool as it refunds mana if it
kills something and resets it's cooldown, it's more commonly used as
a gap closer though and it also does a high amount of AD damage. Then
there's her passive which reduces the durations of crowd control
effects on herself, depending on how many enemy champions are nearby,
starting at 10% for 1 then 25% for 2, and finally 40% for 3. She also
has Equilibrium Strike which does a high amount of damage except it
has a AP modifier, and it also slows the target, or if they have a
higher health percentage than Irelia, it stuns them instead, and it's
duration of both effects increases as it's leveled up. Finally
Transcendent Blades do somewhat low base damage but to further
emphasize the point that Irelia is hard to itemize, it has both a AD
and AP modifier, so if she has a lot of both, then her Transcendent
Blades will do quite a bit of damage, it also heals her for 25% of
the damage it does to enemy champions, or 10% to enemy minions, and
passes through enemies, I personally like this ability a lot once I
figured out how to use it because it's good enough to be a ranged
ability almost for a melee character, not to the extent of
Gangplank's Parrrley, but it's close to being just as good, it's
probably more useful too as it also heals whereas Parrrley does not.
So in short, Irelia can be confusing to
build since she can use almost every stat well, more so than many
other characters, what I've learned and just thought of now is that
every time a character comes along with a situation like that such as
Jax, the solution is to give them hybrid items which I haven't tried
out yet, but I think I'll try it out now before the free rotation
ends.
As for wrapping this post up, Irelia is
a very good champion to use in Dominion and is somewhat similar to
Jax or Xin Zhao in how she functions in the game mode. As with most
champions, the real solution to using her well I think in Dominion
lies with her item build, and while I haven't tested out the
survivability build much, the offensive build works fine and it's
time without Infinity Edge is noticeable but it's not dreadful like
other champions who use it. So, if you like an Assassin Champion that
can be built many different ways even into an off tank apparently, as
well as one that has a good gap closer, and offensive skills, then
Irelia fits all of those roles and can be quite a fun champion to
play in general.
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