League of Legends' Balance Team Explains Why Riven isn't Overpowered

With the frequent talks of banning Yasuo and what to do with the mid laner, the League of Legends balance team members addressed his rival, Riven, and explained why she isn't overpowered.

The question was raised during a recent Ask Riot session where a player hoped to hear about Riven's current state from the team. They responded by saying that Riven isn't OP, she simply has a lot of moving parts that come together to make a powerful champion.

"Riven is a champion with high execution requirements," the Rioters explained. "She has a steep mastery curve (in the top 15% of champions), but is heavily one-tricked, which leads to both inflated win rate numbers and distorts the winrate curve pretty heavily (when a Riven player has to play something else because of bans or an opponent picking their champion, they are more likely to lose than the average player, which depresses their MMR)."

Riven's mobility, CC, and her frequent shielding are all areas that are brought up by players who have issues playing against the snowballing top laner. Combine that with the champion's cooldown-reducing, armor-shredding itemization and you've got a recipe for someone that might be hard to deal with if they get rolling on certain team compositions.

"Additionally, her kit, at a structural level, has a lot of tools that help her succeed — in particular having a lot of mobility to both pick fights and escape," they continued. "This, coupled with defensive capabilities that scale with offense (her E and lifesteal through Death's Dance), leads to her high snowball potential and ability to capitalize on the scrappy nature of Solo Queue."

With all of these individual components coming together, the Rioters agreed that it can certainly feel as though Riven is an unstoppable force once she starts to get ahead of her enemy laner and the rest of their team. But that being said, it still seems that, according to winrates across different divisions, Riven players aren't putting together all of the parts of Riven's kit to convert their fights into wins at a concerning rate.

Yasuo is currently being looked at for more changes in the future, but it seems that Riven is set to stay as is for now.