User blog comment:Akali/Riven's Second Anniversary!/@comment-3308937-20130918012746

"Buffs? Nerfs?"

Honestly, I'm hoping for a rework. I agree with her designer in what he said about Riven a year ago "While she's theoretically balanced in terms of effectiveness - the Riven matchup with many characters is simply lacking from an interactivity standpoint."

My problem with her is that there is no counterplay unless your champion has built-in counterplay. If you're not playing a certain subset of champions there is literally nothing you can do about her, she'll just abuse her burst mobility, 2 CCs, resource-less damage scaling shield and obscene scaling to just eliminate you from the game.

The only thing that is keeping Riven from being ridiculously OP is the fact that if she loses lane she's going to lose the game. I don't consider this balanced. Once Riven gets ahead it is incredibly difficult to do anything to stop her from just faceroll mowing your entire team down.

Riven's problems, to me, are as follows:
 * All physical damage - She's "balanced" around the fact that all her damage is one type, to counter her damage you only have to build armor. I don't consider this a good balance measure due to the synergy she has with Last Whisper and Black Cleaver even without the arpen portions of them.


 * Resource-less - This is what makes her so strong in lane, she only has one resource to worry about, health and that she can cover with her low CD shield that scales with damage. Unlike Garen she scales into late-game extremely well.  Renek is a bit closer to her level but he lacks the sheer mobility and CC that she does and doesn't scale as hard usually taking on a tanky dps role compared to Riven's murder everyone in a combo role.


 * Mobility and CC - These are what really puts her above Garen and Renek. She is so hard to gank, so easy to gank or initiate with and can be a huge lane bully without even having to do anything because her zone of effectiveness is so large and the fact she brings CC with her means that counterplay is pretty much non-existent once she gets on top of you.  One champions I could compare this to is Wukong and his E > auto > Q > W combo, he comes in, hits you hard and then gets out leaving you with nothing to do but sit there with health missing.  It's balanced on Wukong because it doesn't come with CC AND he's limited by something called mana.  Riven's shield dash makes it so that once she gets in on you with her Q she can just run away with no consequence.


 * Scaling and Steroids - This is what makes Riven broken. She has some of, if not the highest scaling in the game when you factor in her ultimate's ridiculous AD steroid boosting the only stat that she needs letting her double dip into her favorite stat.  There's a reason there isn't a deathcap for ADs, it's ridiculous and that's what Riven has on her ult on top of the range increase and windslash.

Adding onto the scalings and steroids bit, her AD scaling with her ult up ranges from 624% - 768% of her bonus attack damage with 720 - 1040 base damage not including the fact that, unlike AP mages, she has her ridiculously strong empowered auto attacks for when her cooldowns are down. On top of all of this she has that 1-1.2*bonus AD scaling shield of hers that no other ad champ can boast on a 6 second cooldown with a dash included.

tl;dr: Riven is broken, she may not be OP but she is broken. I hope she gets a rework so she is more fun to play as, with and against and less snowball pubstomp-y.