User blog comment:Simbey/Real Talk: Riven/@comment-5922618-20140117152815

Ok.

First of all I hate this new I-can-read-my-own-name thing. I do, I really really do.

Now, I don't agree with your post, and bear in mind that I don't play Riven at all; she was my first champion long ago and I had hella fun with her but right now solo lanes aren't really my thing so it's been forever since I last got into a game with her.

First of all, Yasuo does not have 0 armor. In fact, at level 1 he has 15, which mitigates Riven's combo damage down to 192.34. If we take runes into account, (armor seals?) the damage is further reduced to 174-ish. Admittedly, as Yasuo you also have your passive, and you definitely should start with a Doran's Shield if you're against a Riven.

Other champions have means to reduce even more of said damage, and as Yasuo you can definitely play around that with your E.

With this nerf Riven is going to have a harder time early, and if she doesn't shine early she's going to have a hard time later on. She is meant to be a bit of a bully in lane because she needs to build an advantage: without that, she can't go absolute beashtmode in teamfights (see what I did here?), especially now that her E has been nerfed. You can't expect to get free farm against her, but if you manage to stay alive and get a decent amount of cs, you can consider yourself ahead. Plus, Riven's E nerf also means that playing her mid will be more difficult, since most mid laners are ranged APs that can fuck her up with autos+ranged skillshots.

Now to your suggestion: making Riven a mana-based champion would kill her because she is a combo assassin without any kind of reset and she relies on CDR. She would either drain herself OOM in one combo or self-negate part of her damage, resulting in her getting continuously stuck inside the enemy team without any chance of doing anything.

If her shield was AP-based she would become a completely different champion: people would build her like they build Renekton or Shyv, so she'd deal no damage at all and she'd be even more useless, since there would be better picks than her.

I don't know how good Riven is in this patch, and she will probably need further tweaking, but I'm pretty sure she's far from impossible to play against.

I hope that I made my point clear and that I didn't say anithing moronic.

Let me know what you think :) bb