Welcome to the Thirsty Irelia build. This build focuses around maximising irelia's natural tankiness and already present lifesteal on her ultimate spell in order to stay in a teamfight for an extremely long time, effectively chase down and kill runners as well as easily 1v1 with near any carry with appropriate use of your abilities.

The runes I have chosen focus on the use of your bladesurge for both farming and harras. The mana regen helps keep your mana up along with flat AD runes to give it a high level of strength early game. The evasion seals also aid to this effect, giving you much higher survivabilty against any Carry you may face in lane early.

The masteries I have chosen focus on lane sustain and tankiness that will last throughout the game, this allows irelia to dominate her early game which is important as during those first few critical levels she finds it hard to push out damage without taking some shove herself.

Your starting items are the classic boots and three healthpots, this allows you that bit of extra mobility during your first laning phase along with the healing you need to deal with harras allowing for more extensive leveling in your blade surge meaning you can push out as much damage as you recieve. The Frozen Mallet, Warmogs, Ninja Tabi and Atmas impaler foucs on making Irelia as tanky as possible whilst sustaining good damage, she becomes insanely hard both to kill and to run from, making her an excelent initiater in both team fights and ganks, whilst having high survivability in both situations. The build also includes a pair of blood thirsters, one early game and one late. These bloodthirsters give an insane amount of lifesteal, and encourage irelia to attack more, maximising on her bonus damage from hiten style, whilst also synergising with her natural tankiness. This also makes dropping low for a stun off of equilibram strike much more viable as you can gain back the health you've lost as soon as the stun is landed, and often you can win the 1v1 situations that most irelias can not handle.

The skill sequence I have chosen focuses on your blade surge, this is a powerful tool as mentioned elsewhere in the guide for both farming and harrass. Taking points in her ultimate wherever possible, Irelia's ultimate is not to be underestimated both for the healing it provides, and it's effectivness in chasing down / turret diving targets. I focus hiten style afterwards as it synergises with the bloodthirster build as well as effectivley giving free bonus damage, afterwards I take points in equilibram strike as I mainly use it for preventing any gap opening abilities being a problem.

A general idea for harras against a melee is try and take the first hit, before following with an equilibram strike to stun them before hitting your hiten style for maximum harras. When fighting melee, always position yourself between their minions and you, this gives them no farm and allows you to both escape with a bladesurge onto minions aswell as still grab last hits when you're out of melee range. When against a ranged, a good idea is to use your bladesurge on a minion that is low for the refreshed cooldown before following into another bladesurge onto the ranged, this makes for an excelent gap closer and often results in the ranged running, allowing you plenty of free hiten style hits along with a slow from your equilibram strike.