Illaoi was recently released with some mixed criticism from the community. Some players think she is too strong while other have come to the conclusion that she is useless or weak. Let's take a look at the stats and how Illaoi functions to better understand her place in the game

For details on Illaoi’s kit you may refer to this page for details on interactions and numbers.

Raw Stats

To gain an understanding of when a champion is at their strongest, early, mid, or late game, we should consider their base and per level stats. Illaoi has rather average health and movement speed stats but has a rather large amount of AD per level, totalling to 145 at level 18. This gives her the second highest attack damage at level 18 just 1 point under Mordekaiser.

Her mana regen stat is fairly generous considering her mana costs and her health regeneration per second is quite high, edging out Trundle from 5th highest HP regen at level 1 but just under Trundle at level 18. From these numbers we can conclude that Illaoi has good mana to mana regen ratios along with good base AD scaling per level.

Abilities

Illaoi’s passive spawns on nearby walls but require Illaoi to be a certain range away from the nearest Tentacle before it will spawn another. This means that Tentacles will not stack closely to one another.

Illaoi’s Tentacle Smash passive is what allows her to fight multiple enemies at once, healing 5% of her missing health for each time a tentacle hits an enemy champion. This ability has a fairly good mana cost to cooldown ratio, enabling Illaoi to use it repeatedly to push a lane or to harass. Unlike other abilities, Illaoi’s Tentacle Smash does not receive more damage per rank but scales based on her level while the AD ratio scales with ranks of the ability.

Harsh Lesson is not that impressive on its own but similar to Tentacle Smash it has a low mana cost and a low cooldown which ends at a fairly nice 4 seconds at level 5. The most important part about this ability is how it interacts with Leap of Faith and your tentacles. Harsh Lesson causes all nearby tentacles to attack the target struck by Harsh Lesson. Leap of Faith reduces the cooldown of Harsh Lesson to 2 seconds for 8 seconds. This is hugely beneficial to Illaoi as she can choose a target for her tentacles to attack. Harsh lesson is a hugely valuable ability following Tentacle Smash and should be maxed second in order to reduce the cooldown outside of the duration of Leap of Faith.

Test of Spirit has a pretty generous range and mana cost at level one considering the benefits Illaoi can reap out of it but has a rather slow travel time. Test of Spirit allows Illaoi to harass enemies from afar or force them to come to her. Should they choose to run they become a vessel which is hugely annoying for the enemy. This gives Illaoi additional tentacles for the duration her enemy is a vessel that further establish Illaoi’s dominance in the lane.

Test of Spirit also interacts with Leap of Faith causing Leap of Faith to produce an additional tentacle for striking the spirit of an enemy champion. This ability has a decent AoE, standard mana cost, less than average base damage, decent scaling, and a decent cooldown timer. The most impressive parts of this ability is that it reduces the cooldown of Harsh Lesson to two seconds, which at level six reduces level two Harsh Lesson by 3.5 seconds which comes out to about 64% cooldown reduction on the ability. In addition to Illaoi’s tentacles becoming untargetable and attacking 50% faster, this ability is a bit overloaded in relation to how much damage Illaoi’s tentacles deal.

Observation

Illaoi’s kit is heavily tuned toward deal large amounts of damage and dominating a lane but lacks a true form of CC for her to keep enemies near her. Arriving into lane early will allow Illaoi to spawn two tentacles in lane which will enable her to use Test of Spirit or Harsh Lesson to utilize the tentacles early.

Tentacle Smash’s ratio is very high, has a good cast time and animation that it isn’t too hard to land, low cost, and fairly low cooldown. This allows Illaoi to spend her mana pushing the lane into the enemy tower as well as for some small health return. This can be a problem as when Illaoi pushes her enemy under the tower they have no minions to hide behind.

Without any minions to hide behind Illaoi is more able to use her Test of Spirit to harass the enemy under their tower but out of range. The enemy is then forced to either engage Illaoi to reduce the time in which the spirit is active, potentially missing last hits, or subjected to becoming a vessel. Becoming a vessel as a melee champion is a huge hindrance to play under as tentacles will spawn and immediately lash out toward your location upon rising. Players who become vessels must deal with this until they kill three tentacles or after a minute. With each attempt an enemy makes to kill a tentacle Illaoi can use Harsh Lesson to teach them to know better than to try to take down a tentacle. Being watchful to how your enemy moves can make for some very one-sided trades in Illaoi’s favor.

While Illaoi naturally pushes with her Tentacle Smash one might think that this would make her vulnerable to ganks. Illaoi thrives facing multiple opponents, if she is able to pull a spirit and land Leap of Faith to create three tentacles she outputs an enormous amount of damage which can easily net her a double kill. The short cooldown of Harsh Lesson provided by Leap of Faith ensures that her tentacles are hard at work. This can potentially mean that ganking Illaoi may lead to her ending the gank even stronger than when the jungler arrived.

Strengths

Illaoi has high base stats in HP regen and AD per level with the addition of low spell costs on her Tentacle Smash, Harsh Lesson, and Test of Spirit. Illaoi has fairly high sustain with her HP regen and Tentacle Smash and the fact that Tentacle Smash has a low mana cost to mana regen ratio means that you can use it fairly liberally until you are able to strike an enemy champion. Illaoi doesn’t have to be as afraid when being ganked as a quick use of Test of Spirit and Leap of Faith can quickly create a bad situation for the enemy allowing for a double kill or intimidate them into allowing you to escape at the least. Here is a brief highlight of DIG Gamsu on Illaoi on Korean solo queue.

Weaknesses

Illaoi has a rather low attack speed base which can make last hitting under tower difficult. This also means that Illaoi benefits less from attack speed items such as Blade of the Ruined King.

Even after the nerf to summoner spell Teleport many top laners are still using it due to the amount of impact the spell can have. Illaoi has low impact ganks as at best she is able to apply a 80% slow once enemies leave the area of Test of Spirit. This can mean that enemy top laners can assist their team more impactfully than Illaoi can although she can still become a menace at pushing towers. I've used teleport but from my experience I gathered that ignite would allow for a much stronger snowball should that be your goal.

Illaoi’s tentacles have a slow attack speed and respond a bit slowly in reaction to Harsh Lesson, only coming down on the target a bit after you've used Harsh Lesson while Test of Spirit tends to get a quicker response out of nearby tentacles. Champions with high movement speed or dashes can easily avoid their attack. The tentacles require two hits to be killed which makes ranged champions more effective at controlling the lane against Illaoi as they can kite back and attack tentacles at a distance rather than putting themselves closer to Illaoi’s Harsh Lesson.

In addition to being weak against ranged champions, as they are able to take down her tentacles, champions like Quinn can kite Illaoi and take lane control away from her.

Illaoi also does poorly against enemies with high sustain in a extended duel later into the game. Champions with Guinsoo’s Rageblade or other items like Xin Zhao, Volibear, Jax, and Aatrox can sustain through Illaoi’s damage to take her down.

Illaoi also lacks an engage tool. Even if Illaoi has snowballed ahead it is difficult for her to make plays off of her strengths alone. She relies on her teammates to lock enemies down or to hold them down during the duration of Leap of Faith in order to take advantage of her maximum damage potential.

Item Builds

Illaoi scales incredibly well with AD and being similar to Darius, she wants to be in the thick of the fight, she also wants to build HP with AD. Some players have a preference for building Black Cleaver as their first item but I prefer Titanic Hydra. Completing Jaurim’s Fist gives Illaoi respectable stats and Titanic Hydra’s passive splashes in a cone making it simple to clear waves with her Tentacle Smash.

Sterak’s Gage is another great item for Illaoi as she should look to hit as many enemies as possible with Leap of Faith. Sterak’s Gage will help to keep her alive should she face large amounts of burst damage before she can activate her ultimate.

After experimenting with Iceborn Gauntlet I’ve found that I didn’t like it as much as Frozen Mallet. Illaoi benefits from having either item as it can slow enemies down for tentacles to land and while she can use the extra CDR from Iceborn Gauntlet she does need the extra mana. A better armor item might be Deadman’s Plate as it gives her bonus movement speed to land Harsh Lesson in addition to adding more damage to Titanic Hydra.

I recommend building Mercury Treads often as CC will stop you from healing from Tentacle Smash’s passive and from landing Harsh Lesson to prompt tentacles to attack. Other boots should be built accordingly (i.e Ninja Tabi against a team with multiple sources of physical damage and low CC). This isn't a six item recommendation as I haven't gotten the opportunity to reach a full build on Illaoi but I believe that Last Whisper, Hexdrinker and its upgraded variant, and BloodThirster are also viable items.

Finer Details

Illaoi’s tentacles require that they be a certain range away from the last tentacle. The image above shows two tentacles measuring about 1000 units away from each other.

The image above shows that two tentacles can spawn across from each other. The distance between the two tentacles in the image above measures about 900 units or the length of Illaoi’s Test of Spirit. Using this as an indicator you can measure where your next tentacle will spawn. This is probably the ideal set-up you want when pushing past the first tier tower.

Illaoi’s tentacles tend to spawn from her sides or where her arms are in her in game model. Therefore to strategically spawn tentacles one should stand horizontally with the terrain they want a tentacle.

Avoid hugging curved tertain as they can often place your tentacles a bit further away than where you’d like. In the above image I wanted to place my tentacle on the red circle but due to how tentacles spawn from Illaoi’s model the tentacle ended a bit further down. Heading into lane before minions spawn will also give you more tentacles to work with so head to lane as quickly as possible.

If you find yourself on the receiving end of a gank make sure to take the opportunity to walk away from a 2v1 if you ever feel unsure about getting a kill. While Illaoi does well against multiple enemies if her damage is split or if enemies walk in and out of range from her tentacles attacks she can still lose a 2v1. In other words if one champion draws aggro from Illaoi and her tentacles and the other champion attacks during the cooldown of Harsh Lesson her damage is split among two targets and increases the chance of her dying. Should you choose to stay and fight an ideal skirmish will have you standing near a tentacle with the spirit of your enemy and the target of Test of Spirit standing adjacent so that your tentacles will hit both the spirit and the champion.

Predictions for the Future of Illaoi

While there remain ways to counter play Illaoi’s kit it is still quite difficult to execute those plays. As stated earlier melee champions have a harder time clearing tentacles against Illaoi and Test of Spirit gives Illaoi harass that enemies cannot respond to if the spirit is pulled near tentacles or under Illaoi’s tower. Due to this I expect Test of Spirit to receive a balance change either increasing the mana cost or decreasing the duration of the spirit to scale with ranks of the ability.

Illaoi’s HP regen coupled with her small heal from Tentacle Smash gives her too much sustain and I expect for her HP regen to be balanced to a lower value.

Illaoi will most likely make for a decent support as her base values are high and her damage without solo lane gold will also be respectable. Illaoi will most likely be poor at jungling as she has poor attack speed and somewhat relies on her tentacles for damage. Illaoi will probably not make a very good midlaner as her tentacles are more vulnerable to ranged champions and as stated earlier she has low impact ganks without a source of CC. Even after my own proposed balance changes to Illaoi I believe she will still be viable but remain in the middle of the second to the best tier.

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