Talk:Riven/@comment-6746408-20131124173235/@comment-8506165-20131213184233

But surely balance should be calculated based on maximisation, no? The point is that if someone's played at their maximum potential and they're doing too much, they deserve to be nerfed. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to do. If Mordekaiser could immediately ace the enemy team by playing a few bars of Metallica with absolutely precise timing using QWER it'd be too strong - it wouldn't matter if most people were unable to do it and people who could do it consistently worked really hard to get it.

I mean, look at Sona. She's a fairly low skill ceiling champion, with a low skill floor as well. This doesn't mean that everyone's screaming that Sona's OP. Most decent Sona players are playing her with a maximised kit. But what she can do with that is a lot less than... well, what Riven can do.

Shifting power around a kit can still amount to an overall nerf if it compensates for someone being "too good" at everything. Take Ahri - she had her single-target damage if she hits E buffed because she's meant to kill single targets after hitting that, but it means she can no longer do quite the damage she did to an entire team in a teamfight because now Charm isn't just CC with weak damage, it's what she depends on for maximum damage. So... yes, she's actually slightly better at killing single targets in the hands of a skilled player. She's no longer as good at wrecking entire teams if she's fed though.

So look at Riven, and what she's meant to do. High damage early game? Check. Bruiser? Um, no. Most Rivens build full melee carry with four damage items, cooldown boots and one defensive choice. A bad thing in and of itself? No, but it's indicative of one of her problems - she was designed in a time when building offensive options was a trap on most bruisy characters because of the superiority of defensive choices. Itemisation changes since then have made that no longer the case. Snowballer? Well, she snowballs, mostly as a result of the aforementioned point. But is someone who has a %AD steroid with an execution move and an AD-scaling, low-CD shield negating the need to build defenses to stay relevant really dependent on snowballing, as a snowball champ should be? Ehh... unless you count the number of times I've seen Riven catch up within two teamfights as some kind of weird anomaly, no... The risky snowball-dependent champs (or those that are perceived as such) tend not to be picked so much in Diamond elo, where Riven still sees a lot of play.

Overall, this just adds up to her being too strong in my opinion. I honestly don't care if early game she can mash her face on the keyboard and get kills (o hai Xin Zhao), the point is she needs some weakness to compensate for the fact it's so easy for her to snowball early (if she can do it somewhat consistently, even if high skill is required, if she then goes on to wreck entire games she's too strong). Renekton, for instance, is someone built to win his lane, but he doesn't scale nearly so well into mid or late from that. Teemo is virtually an auto-win against AA-dependent champs in lane, but good luck winning your teamfights with him on your team unless he's managed to totally shut the enemy laner down. You can't mention direct counters as a weakness - Garen does well against her, for instance, but that doesn't say anything for everyone else for whom it should be more a skill lane, or a case of capitalising on her weaknesses later on. The problem is, she doesn't have enough. She's an AoE high-damaging champ who's hard to kill, with a strong mid-late game if she gets even one kill early on (I believe you yourself have said "a Riven with one kill is already out of control") and her strong early means that it's not just more imperative to deal with her early, but harder to do so, short of outright counters as I said.

So any "balancing" that allows her to do exactly the same thing in the hands of someone who's halfway competent? It doesn't address any issues other than her being good at low levels, and that's not something Riot balance around unless it's a serious problem.