Talk:Riven/@comment-3524016-20110919185720/@comment-4260974-20110920002014

TL;DR ... People see bad riven players and assume riven is a bad champion

Ive played about 10 games with Riven now trying a few different build archetypes and the one ive found most effective is Atmogs bruiser type build, but with Hextech Gunblade (basically taken from a guide on Leaguecraft.com) and some CDR

Havent lost a game with her (but thats actually because my bad games got carried by having a great team), but here are my thoughts on her.

As was said above, she doesnt have a very distinctive role, and doesnt really shine at whatever you try and get her to do. Building pure damage doesnt work cus she is so squishy (even with that shield) that she dies before she can pull off her full Q combo, building very tanky doesnt work because she cant CC and is therefore no threat to the enemy team, and in turn is just running about tickling stuff till her team is dead. So building somewhere in between is the only way to go. Problem with this is, she doesnt quite do enough damage to be considered a major threat before lategame (when chances are any other damage dealer on your team is doing it better), but she isnt tanky enough to initiate any fights.

She is incredibly fun to play, but in general is a bit lackluster. She is far from a bad champ, but doesnt have much of a viable role in any ranked game imo. One of those "I just want a few normal games for fun" type champs.

I believe however, that most people are saying riven is bad is because, every. Single. Time. A new champ is released, noone can quite tell whether they are OP, UP, or god forbid, balanced, because everyone is still learning the champ and they havent quite settled into their own meta yet. And specifically with riven, she has a horrible early game vs anything but a bad player or bad champ to take a solo lane. For this reason, I assume the majority of players see people playing riven and just feeding with her early game,and therefore assume that riven must be bad. Because they cant get it into their collective heads that it might just be the player is bad....

Rant over.