Irelia has been building BOTRK for years now, thus giving frustration for people facing it while also having significant downsides for Irelia herself.
First things first, what is BOTRK for Irelia?
Pros
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- Good buildpath
Irelia loves recurve bow for on-hits and vamp scepter for lifesteal, as it heals of her Q’s bonus damage to minions
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- Oneshotting casters at lvl 9
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- Gives her shitload of damage especially against low-armor targets.
Which makes midlane Irelia viable btw, this champion unironically dives mages from behind, which is not normal. That comprises part of reasoning why I don’t play her at midlane.
In summary
AN INSAKE POWESPIKE. I guess you can imagine it from your own experience. There is no comparison to it in this game, Irelia with Blade has an unprecedented powerspike.
So yes, it is understandable why playing against Irelia feels frustrating – because she brings you the League of Items vibe the hard way – by oneshotting you.
However, why would Irelia players want her untied of BOTRK?
Cons
- 1. BOTRK fucks up her melee fighter’s itemisation.
Irelia is primarily a teamfighter, she neither has the best dueling on a sidelane nor takes towers fast. She’s a flanker and diver. Fantasy that blade doesn’t really fit into.
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- BOTRK accelerates her toplane frustrations and matchups make it even worse.
Toplane is rough for Irelia as her power curve HEAVILY depends on the matchups and BOTRK timing.
So, in a winning matchup like Aatrox Irelia gets the Blade in good tempo, thus steamrolling the poor guy even harder. However if she falls behind she’s omega useless and NEEDS to wait for bork. She has 43% against Jax and 57% against Yorick (according to lolalytics). That’s what we call the difference.
- 3. Irelia is balanced around BOTRK and is disgustingly useless without it.
- 4. It’s been for YEARS now.
In total,
we have Irelia being a BOTRK delivery system which is frustrating to play as and against, promotes degenerate gameplay, makes her frustrations worse and wastes a slot in the inventory in the late game.
How to change it?
Make Q not apply on-hit effects, reduce its lifesteal effectiveness, increase healing’s AD scaling, increase her other AD ratios and base damage until it lands well.
Make the BOTRK era end, please, it has been too much. We’re tired of building this abomination of an item.
To think Riot, their job being the game design, who reworked her basically 3 times couldnt make a useful consistent balanced champion out of it and have some randoms come with their toilet seat cooked ideeas on how to “balance” her - aka gut her more… funny.
Her kit has to be reworked, not adjusted, reworked.