I know I’ve been on a mini-hiatus the past couple days, but I have had a chance to catch a game here and there and I think I’ve seen enough of Irelia to put together an impression post. I’ve found her to be incredibly underwhelming and disappointing to play. The things she can do can typically be done better by other champions. That sort of design works when a toon does a lot of different things, but Irelia is just melee DPS, nothing else. It’s not like Morgana, who shields and deals damage and CCs (and still does most of these things better than other characters).

I’m always a little way when Riot releases a melee champion, I think for good reason. Melee is very difficult to balance in this game if you don’t give them a very particular set of skills. They need to be able to close the gap on ranged toons to prevent kiting, they need some sort of defensive ability to keep them alive, and they need to do enough damage to rip up a mage or squishy target as quickly as that target can return the favor.

On the surface, it looks like Irelia has these things. Her passive gives her some CC reduction, she has a dash, and she has two lifesteal skills to keep her alive. With a closer look, though, you can see that her skills don’t work well with one another and lead to confused builds that don’t ultimately scale very well.

Start with her passive – with three enemies on you, Irelia gets 40 percent CC reduction. That’s all well and good, but players still get stunlocked with Mercury Treads, which is essentially what you get from the skill. In short, her passive sucks, and it doesn’t provide the CC she needs. If she was impossible to CC when four or five enemies were nearby, that would be interesting. Obviously you would have to scale down her damage, but it makes the passive actually useful.

Her dash has another issue. While it is good for moving to a target, Irelia has no way to get away from a threat, and her dash can leave her stranded in the middle of a fight. Once there, she doesn’t have a lot of options. Her passive won’t help her get away much, and she can’t leech back enough health in most cases to keep her up.

Her stun is a problem, if only because it’s so conditional. The fact that she has to be lower health than her target suggests that you allow Irelia to get low (lower than her target anyhow), stun, and then leech back your health with her passive lifesteal from both her W skill and her ultimate. That’s fine against one target, but in the midst of a teamfight, she feels very exposed.

Then there’s her W. It grants true damage and fixed lifesteal. The fixed part is very important because it means she doesn’t scale well as a lifesteal champion without buying a lot of lifesteal, instead of buying damage. This prioritizes Bloodthirster for her over Infinity Edge, which is where she would get burst. The true damage is great, but that requires you have a lot of attack speed to make the best of it. Attack speed doesn’t scale very well with the rest of her skills, though. She’s yet another toon that has a complicated and confused item prioritization that ultimately makes every build feel like it’s missing something.

You can see from Phreak’s spotlight how hard a time melee has with attack speed. There are several instances in which he might have had a kill if he didn’t get slowed or stunned by another champion. Irelia’s dash is on such a long cooldown if not used for a killing blow that it doesn’t make for good chasing, and without a good way to her target close at hand, she never gets to make use of all that attack speed. A champion like Tryndamere actually does very well because he can both get into and out of the fight using Spinning Slash and he can slow a group of targets from range. Irelia can only get in on one target, and once in, she can get shut down just like any other melee toon. Her passive just isn’t enough.

A friend of mine really likes Master Yi. I try to understand, I really do, but at the end of the day all I see is a toon with no escape mechanism and no team utility. If your opponent is bad enough he can be fine, even great, but if your enemy is mildly competent you’re going to have some trouble. To some extent his problem can be blamed on the fact that he’s melee, and melee toons have it rough. You have to throw yourself in harm’s way and hope you can live through the CC and burst long enough to get your damage in. As one forum poster put it, “when will melee DPS be viable?”

Here’s what Phreak had to say:

Melee DPS poops on kids in Treeline. It’s going into matchmaking soon. Melee DPS being underpowered is simply a function of 5 people being able to burst down 1 melee DPS super quickly. Champions like Udyr, Tynda (sic), and Mundo are able to kite in and out and heal or shield themselves, ignoring a lot of the burst out there. Yi can do similar things with meditate, I suppose.

Mostly, I feel like melee DPS does really well in small battles, and then in the larger ones seems to require a good support champ like Morgana or Kayle to keep him alive vs 5 champions. Otherwise you need to use supreme discretion to get in and out. Generally you should grab Cleanse. Ghost isn’t a bad option either. IMO it’s a different playstyle.

I agree with him for the most part. Melee toons have to choose their battles very carefully, which is why a full melee team rarely succeeds. But played well, I think melee is just as viable as any ranged. Most ranged suffer, in fact, from a reduced health pool or slightly lower damage. I’ve had some excellent games with Nasus, a toon with no escape to speak of, simply through smart play and the Ghost/Cleanse combo. It’s all about picking your battles, and making sure your teammates can help support you on your way to close the gap.