- Irelia recently received a new skin whose animations leave her at a disadvantage
- When using the skin, the champion’s base attack speed is noticeably reduced
- This is especially prominent in the early game when she has no bonus attack speed
League of Legends skins rarely make an impact on the game, but Irelia’s most recent cosmetic change brought in a big VFX issue that drastically disadvantages the champion in the early game.
Irelia’s New Skin Comes with Issues
Riot Games have been busy with updates since the start of the year, bringing in many changes to League of Legends. However, it seems not everything has been received with open arms by the community as many have criticized some of the decisions undertaken by Riot Games.
The latest issue fans found is a problem with Irelia’s new Mythic skin – Mythmaker. Considering it’s a skin, one would think that the issue fans have is a purely aesthetic one. But it seems that cosmetic change brings about tangible gameplay issues. While skins usually don’t have an impact on gameplay, those that have special VFX animation changes can often give champions a distinct advantage or disadvantage. In fact, Jax’s recent overhaul came with such issues as well, where some of his animations were drastically slowed down if the champion was using one of his skins.
Irelia seems to be suffering from the same problem as many have noticed the champion’s Mythic skin’s VFX animations, when displayed in slow motion, reveal a small delay between Irelia’s animation and the blade’s effect when hitting opponents. Additionally, Riot has changed the champion’s voice lines recall, and ability animations – all changes that many players seem to dislike.
Her Attack Speed Is Noticeably Reduced
The issue has been talked about in length in a Reddit post, where the OP placed links to gifs analyzing the character’s new auto animations. From them, it becomes clear that there is a substantial delay in each hit when using Irelia’s new skin.
“The biggest culprit here is Auto 4, the kick animation, where the VFX appears and finishes way before the blades follow and the auto-attack connects,” the OP explains. “Auto 4's attack also hits the target before the blades themselves are even remotely close to the target as seen here. The damage registers while the blades are still behind Irelia on Auto 4 and while she is still winding up her kick.”
This issue is more impactful at the early stages of the game when Irelia has no bonus attack speed and her auto attacks are essential to her success in the laning phase. “Performance in the early game is crucial to Irelia’s impact, one single missed/canceled auto-attack due to unsynchronized VFX is lethal to becoming irrelevant for the rest of the game,” one player explained. The issue was humorously named “pay to lose” by some players.
It's still unknown when or if Riot will address this issue.
