User blog comment:Care Level/RE: PBE Riven Nerf/@comment-24242333-20131219125949

Seeing as Riot is aiming at reducing snowballing in general, it was obvious that Riven was going to be nerfed. I can't say I'm not happy about it either; seeing a champion in about 90% of your games, whoever it is, is super annoying (I don't really care about her pick/win rate, I'm talking about my own experience here)

But like you and other people said, I'm not sure if they hit the right points. I can't tell for sure -I'm a terrible Riven player- but, like you said below, hitting the cooldown on the shield would probably have been better than hitting it's duration. I recently saw a video of a low life Riven playing on purple side that, when ganked, went all the way down the blue side top lane, past the towers there, in the enemy base, near the inhibs, past the blue bot lane towers, shut down a leblanc with a well placed wind slash, and then recalled in her bot lane. All of that with an enemy champion on her toe, because she could just use her shield every time she went in tower range and not get damaged. Hitting the cooldown would remove that kind of abuse (I'm not using that word randomly; I consider the "can't kill me can't kill me can't kill me" thing an abuse).

The shield isn't part of her snowball potential IMO; it's part of her insane mobility. Which I'm fine with, honestly. Her snowball potential comes from her really strong early; addressing that was the thing to do, and they did; right or not, I'm not sure.

As for the items nerf, I'm not sure it's a good idea to mention them here. As you said, they hit everyone. Spirit visage + sunfire cape was so strong it was called the "tard build". They needed to nerf them. I too am going to miss this 10% CDR on Spirit Visage; but hey, it was really super strong before. Even without the passive, it was one of the best MR items avaible. I'm not going to talk about Sunfire; I don't use it often enough to realise how hard it was nerfed.