Talk:Riven/@comment-4834593-20161018183124/@comment-7765731-20161123071236

It's actually the other way around - A decent Darius will likely be able to go head-to-head with or even straight up butcher a decent Riven, but the matchup gets exponentially better for Riven the better the Riven player gets (even if the Darius player is equally good). I can't seem to find the site I looked up the statistics for their specific matchup sorted by player rankings, but it was either in Darius' favor or somewhat even in lower ratings (gold-), but Riven's winrate went up drastically the higher you got. By master/challenger Riven would win the matchup roughly 60-65% of the time.

You make a lot of points that simply doesn't happen unless Riven screws up. There are a lot of tiny things that makes the matchup a nightmare for Darius. First of all he *needs* to get an advantage early because of how quickly Riven will outscale him and how good her kit is against him, but the only point where he can realistically have a shot at making that happen is level 1 and 2. The problem is that a good Riven will never let Darius stick long enough to her at the first two levels. Once Riven is level 3 you're pretty much stuck in a lane where you can't afford to do anything unless she screws up - if you hook her, you've blown your only way of making a trade long enough to have even a remote chance of winning it. If you use your Q, you've given her a free shot at wrecking your face. I'll point out a few things that are major problems for Darius in this matchup;

1) If Darius doesn't hit the outer ring of his Q in the earlygame he's actually losing out on more dps than he's gaining - unless he pulls a W->Q to cancel the W animation, but he's never going to land the outer ring against Riven like that - not to mention he also doesn't get a stack during that time. Unless Riven messes up, you either just W->Q to get the inner ring damage while wasting as little animation time as possible, or you just keep autoattacking hoping Riven will mess up somewhere to give you an opportunity to hit the outer ring.

2) Darius really needs to get to 5 stacks against Riven if he hopes to win a trade, but because of his long AA windup and Riven's ability to cancel his autoattacks (twice, mind you), a good Riven can delay your stacking significantly by timing her cc well. If Darius had a faster AA windup, this one wouldn't really be a problem. Combined with the duration of her CC, you're losing well around 2-3 seconds where you're not stacking up.

3) I mentioned this already in a discussion further down here, but Riven has way more kill pressure on Darius than he has on her. Riven has to commit to a fight she's already losing in order for Darius to have any reasonable shot of killing her, while Riven is free to pick off Darius at her own leisure. On top of this Darius is way more gankable than Riven. In some matchups this isn't so much of a problem since Darius can handle a lot of 1v2's reasonably as long as he has control of the lane, but Darius has enough trouble staying alive in this lane to begin with. Post-6 Riven has enough damage to all-in him relatively early as far as HP bars go, adding a jungler to that for some extra damage and cc just screams out your demise.

I don't know what level you're playing at but I could swallow calling Darius a counter - or atleast a somewhat favorable matchup in gold or lower, but there's just no way a good Riven player will lose against a good Darius player on their own in diamond or above without making a major mistake.