Talk:Riven/@comment-10958525-20131210095149/@comment-5057599-20131211151009

@MegaMege Don't get me wrong, I think your post is well thought out and it suggests a good balance point for her. I just don't agree that Riven is too strong at lower elos. She is too strong period. More so at higher elos where people can mix their abilities and autos in a fluid way.

Kassadin is a stigmatized champion. He'll always be deemed OP regardless of what Riot does to him because having a damaging Flash on a 95% reduced CD compared to everyone else doesn't seem 'fair'. Personally I think he's strong but definitely not a priority ban. There's still a lot of ways to destroy Kass in lane, even if his counterplay goes down dramatically after lvl 6.

Either way, both Riven and Kass are champions who are out of control in solo queue. Both share the same traits: insane mobility, huge damage output, snowballing kits and brutal scaling with items and levels. But Riven takes all of this up a notch by being manaless, having a strong early game, an amazing wave clear at all stages of the game and worst of all: having virtually no bad matchups. Kassadin has spotable weaknesses, such as getting dumped by anything that can push a lane hard and harass at distance early game and pretty much having to be babysat by the jungler through the early laning against any AD caster. Riven on the other hand starts with Elixir and does not lose a lane at all. Even worse now that everyone starts with wards, so she's harder to gank too. She needs to be tuned down for the same reason champions like Jayce, Zac or Zyra were nerfed: overloaded kits with way too much going for them without any downsides.

I think increasing her cooldowns is a FIRST STEP towards a more reasonable state. I still think her base damages should go down a bit because she's already the only champion in the game who has AD scalings on all 5 abilities and having above-average scalings on top of that puts her overboard. The good Rivens will be able to deal with 100 less damage and 1 extra second of CD on a full rotation (merely an example) but at the same time it opens up new windows for counterplay by her matchups instead of being forced to rush Sunfire Cape and Tabi on every champion before considering anything else if you're against Riven.

On a side note, Sivir is not banned often because the metashift rendered ADCs more or less obsolete. In S3 most bans were targeted at assassins (Zed, Fizz, Ahri, Kass, etc.) to allow carries and squishy mids some breathing room in teamfights, but now the bans shifted to carry junglers, top laners and AoE supports (Shyvana, Evelynn, Riven, Nasus, Annie, Fiddle, etc.) because they are the ones dominating the game right now. What happens is that carries are nothing more than utility/AoE bots (supports 2.0) and that's why Sivir is at the top, because she has both. Nobody bans her because you can actually deal with her in lane and other champions are priority picks/bans.