Riven Build Guide by

[14.8] Become A Riven God

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Riven Build Guide By Updated on

Guide Discussion (259) Reviewed (3) More Riven Guides

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(201) |

Hello there! You requested a review and I am here to deliver. Hopefully I don't start losing to while playing because of this guide.

click for review

Cheat Sheet:
Summoner Spells:

For people who are only going to look at the cheat sheet, the classification for when to take Ignite over Teleport is not clear enough. Both Teleport and Ignite offer impact, just in different ways and methods. Based on your runes and guide, it looks like you take Teleport into hard lanes or match ups, which I would not have gathered from the descriptions alone.

Runes:

You have Absolute Focus instead of Transcendence, and Nimbus Cloak instead of Gathering Storm, which I assume is not intentional based on the content of your guide.
You have Last Stand in the cheat sheet but Coup de Grace in the guide.

Items:

I would separate Doran's Shield from Long Sword start for clarity, but that's just personal preference and is fine as it is.
I assume you rush tier 2 boots before building any components outside of your starting items. If that isn't your goal, it wouldn't hurt to provide further clarity.
Having nearly the exact same build every game seems a little sketchy. I assume Maw of Malmortius can replace Death's Dance against magic heavy teams. Chempunk Chainsword also seems like a viable option, depending on the enemy teamcomp.
Is Eclipse still viable after all the nerfs it got?

Ability Order:

Your second ability order mentions you take it with the grasp runepage, however, that is not in your cheat sheet. Even if it is in your guide, it is safe to assume that some readers will only take a look at the cheat sheet.

Abilities & Essential Combos:

Some of the numbers in here are incorrect. Otherwise, I really like some of the tips in here. If you have more useful tips, make sure to include them. The more the better :)
Riven is a complex champ in terms of combos, and text alone would not have gotten it across. The detailed video is a great addition as a result of this :)

Item Choices:

I want to say text alone here would suffice but I enjoyed some of the memes in the video so I am conflicted :(
I know it's still preseason and items and builds are subject to change, but there are some inconsistences between the video and the cheat sheet.

Forging a Lead:

First of all, I want to applaud you for the word play in the title
The section started out really strong, then unfortunately fell flat after the second point. Could definitely do with much more information and details here. I would personally expand much more on pressure, talk about splitpushing as well, and then tie these two concepts together.

Early Game:

This section starts out strong and finishes strong. Very solid in my opinion. Your match ups guide is also really good, my only advice here is make sure it is up-to-date and add more match ups when you have the time.

Teamfighting:

Requires more details and information. Who do you focus? Are you the front line or are you looking to flank and dive? etc. It's questions like these that may be obvious to you but not always obvious to newer players.

Overall, this is a great guide, and I've learning a great number of new things about , which I will use to my advantage when playing against her >:), with the strong parts of the guide being very impressive. Which is why it's all the more unfortunate that the weaker parts of the guide are holding the amazing parts back.

(38) |

Alright! I've changed the guide drastically! Do you think I have a chance at the guide competition? Also, do they judge on conciseness? I feel like a lot of guides have miles of content when it could be said in a few feet. I've heard they've won in the past but I've put a ton of effort into my Guide making it concise. I feel this way it's easier to keep the reader engaged.

Aesthetics are also important and giant walls of text aren't very attractive. I don't know, it's hard to find the balance between concise and extensive.

(201) |

wrote:

Do you think I have a chance at the guide competition?

That would depend on the quality of the other top lane guides, which to be honest I am not very familiar with so I can't give you an accurate assessment. I would say your cheat sheet still needs improving, most notably making clear which items are not a core part of your build and can be replaced by the situational items.

wrote:

Also, do they judge on conciseness? I feel like a lot of guides have miles of content when it could be said in a few feet. I've heard they've won in the past but I've put a ton of effort into my Guide making it concise. I feel this way it's easier to keep the reader engaged.

Guide length alone is not enough to win you the contest, it just so happens that longer guides tend to win more because they have more information. Guides that are long with poorly presented or low quality information do not tend to win.

wrote:

Aesthetics are also important and giant walls of text aren't very attractive. I don't know, it's hard to find the balance between concise and extensive.

That's the beauty of aesthetics, when done correctly they can make walls of text visually pleasing and easier to read and digest. If walls of text are making a guide unattractive, it's not because of the walls of text, it's because of the lack of aesthetics.

Hopefully what I said proved to be helpful, if you have any more questions please let me know :)

(326) |

Hello Seth346 (or RivalofAll), here is the review you requested.

click for review

Build / Cheatsheet

I saw that you do not have any notes for your rune page. I know that Conqueror and such are pretty popular on Riven but maybe give some insight on specifically why it benefits her? I also saw that you recommend Sorcery secondary, why? On stat sites it shows that Inspiration with Magical Footwear and Cosmic Insight is the most popular choice for all elos, why not go these runes & what makes sorcery a better option?
You also don’t have any notes for the Teleport summoner spells. You do have one for Ignite and whilst that one is rather short, it’s still pretty good and it would be useful to have one for the Teleport version too (considering it’s the first recommended summoner spell you see when opening the guide).
I’m going off of my own opinion here but I feel like it would be better to break these items up into separate sections, something along the lines of this. It makes it less of a mess, gives the same purpose and you can also add in notes for each specific start without the description becoming overly too long to the point where it won’t make any sense. Even more since the notes you have there already only talks about Doran's Blade & Doran's Shield but nothing about Long Sword (there are also 3 health potions you can buy there and not 1, you can achieve this by clicking the health potion 3 times in an item set).
In your notes for boots you only really describe why you need to buy boots and while that itself is really good to mention, you don’t talk anything about the kind of boots you buy on Riven, only about the importance of movement speed (e.g. to get to lane faster). Why and when is Ninja Tabi useful and when is it better to opt for Mercury's Treads. Stat sites also show that you can build Ionian Boots of Lucidity & it’s quite popular on Riven (supposedly has a higher winrate than both mercuries and tabi’s), why not go for these?
Your frontliner build & consistent damage core does not include any boots (would assume that’s the 6th item) and though that is not the most important thing, it can be an option to put it in (e.g. do you need to buy boots early or later, I would assume earlier in the game right?). None of these builds have any notes either so I’m a bit confused as to when each build is useful to go for, maybe that should be explained a little bit?
You also have this random thing in your item section. I think it's a bit pointless to have that there, if there are more item choices for Riven, maybe those should be explained in this cheat sheet as "Situational Items" instead? I feel like that makes more sense, this just looks very off and people will know that there are more stuff in the guide as well.
Your second ability order has the title “Grasp Page” and mentions Grasp again in the notes, despite there are no rune pages or any other mentions of the Grasp rune page/keystone anywhere else in the guide.
I am also going off of my opinion here but I think it’s pretty pointless to have a Threats/Synergies section at the top of the guide if you already have a separate guide talking about the matchups for Riven (with a link to said guide inside of your guide). This sentence is a bit more off-topic from this guide but figured I’d let you know that you don’t need to have a cheatsheet to make the rest of the guide chapters (this is about your matchups guide), I think it’s a bit annoying to have all of this junk taking all of the space at the top of the guide, making you have to scroll even further down to get to the actual matchup section which the entire purpose of that guide is about, right? Also if you use Threats/Synergies only for the synergies part, then I would actually recommend to either have that in your guide or put it in a different section in your already existing matchup guide, I think it fits more there.

Presentation

I think overall you’ve done a great job with the visuals and formatting of the guide. Some text parts are centered for some reason when they don’t really need to be but it’s not to the point where it completely breaks apart the aesthetic feeling of the guide so it’s fine.

Content

About The Author

The second paragraph where you talk about streaming and that it’s the thing that you want to do and stuff, I feel like you can format it better other than just making it centered. Compared to all the other formatting you have in your guide already, this one is the only one I think is a bit lackluster since it’s a cheap way to make some formatting (and it makes the text look weird in this specific case imo). Otherwise the rest looks great.

Coaching

I feel like so much more could be explained within this section. For example, you could explain to your readers what kind of achievements you have gotten on Riven, how far have you gotten playing the champion, and how you would be qualified to be a coach (based on your knowledge of the game & the champion in particular) and so forth. Let’s take an example because I like examples, what if there was a completely new reader coming to MOBAFire. They are an aspiring Riven player and want to get better at the champion, they really want to get some coaching. They have absolutely no idea who you are and have never watched your content but still sees that you coach and might want to look into it. What kind of information more than just the fact that people can add you to get coached would be enough to interest this potential reader into actually getting coached by you since I could imagine that people would like to know what knowledge the coach has in terms of the game or just the champion in question in order to make a decision if they want coaching from them or not. Just a general thought.

Pros / Cons

Are there only 2 pros and cons? I felt like with Riven there would be a few more.
I don’t get how “Least Limited Champion” explains why you have played her a lot and you like playing champions that are difficult and rewards the player for their skill. Typically when I hear “Least Limited Champion” I’d think that means she’s a pretty versatile champion and you can adapt pretty easily with her, she’s not limited to a certain kind of items, runes, playstyle and such. What I get from your description right now is just that you’re explaining the reason why you technically should play Riven (because she’s fun and entertaining).

Spells

There’s only a few issues with this section and it’s a bit about the formatting of it. I feel like you should break apart the first sentence “The main 3 spells on Riven: Flash, Ignite, Teleport.” and have them at the top of the section, as their own description, maybe you can make it longer and add in some additional text to that or you can even put a divider preferably in the same purple-ish color that you already use in order to make sure that one is its own being. I don’t think it should be in the description for Flash because frankly, it doesn’t talk or add anything about why the flash summoner spell is useful for Riven, so maybe it shouldn’t be there? You can also add in a code which is called “indent” which will sorta push the text inwards and it’ll look something like this, which looks cool and the space between them is just normal spaces you can add.

Here's an easy code if you want to do it yourself:

Code:

[indent]The main 3 spells on [[Riven]]: [[Flash]], [[Ignite]] and [[Teleport]].[/indent]
I also noticed that the purple-ish divider you have that breaks apart the summoner spell icons on the left from the text on the right is not the same length as the text so it looks off. The icons themselves look pretty cramped up but not that big of an issue. I think you should up the height of the divider (to at least 285 or 290) so that it’s on par with the text, and if you make the text longer, then the divider should also be longer, I think that looks way better.

Runes

You talk about Coup de Grace inside of your rune section and slowly mention a bit about Last Stand but Last Stand is shown in the cheat sheet and since there are no notes in the cheat sheet, Coup de Grace feels like a mundane choice.
For the secondary tree you mention a few different secondary options which I guess is fine but the main ones you’ve decided to talk about is Nimbus Cloak & Transcendence. Now, in your cheatsheet you do not mention Nimbus Cloak but instead you mention Gathering Storm. Transcendence is also poorly formatted since it’s above gathering in the cheatsheet but below nimbus cloak (or what would be gathering storm) inside of the rune section.
In that same section about secondary trees you also mention Transcendence again despite already covering it further below, why? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cover the other runes that people might run since those are also mentioned in that short description, stuff like the Inspiration & Resolve options?
So there’s an alternate ability maxing order just slapped right in here randomly which I think is weird for a few reasons. If you want to have ability orders, maybe it would make more sense to have a separate section talking about skill sequences (for that purpose). It’s also because it’s called the “alternate maxing order” but there are no main ability maxing orders? I would assume that said ability order that you should go on Riven (like W max) would be before you start talking about rune pages & Conqueror in order to keep it consistent? Since only having this one here is weird and even more so since it’s just the alternate versions, the one you can “maybe” use.
You mention the Grasp of the Undying page, yet there are no such rune page or any mentions of it in the cheat sheet. If it’s a good page to use, it should be mentioned I would say. Looking from some stat sites, it is almost never used, so if it’s not a good page then it wouldn’t make much sense to talk about it if Conqueror is the more superior choice.

Items

You explain the different kinds of starting items way better here then you do in the cheat sheet, so that’s great.
I would mention that merc’s are also great mainly for the tenacity that it provides, considering Riven is so heavily reliant on not getting CC’d, those boots can be a huge help in most situations.
You mention a crit-heavy build but no such build is featured inside of the cheat sheet, only the 2 others you talk about (Frontliner build & Main build).
The descriptions for each build is pretty good but you don’t really go that in-depth on why just these items make the build, why these specific items are the go-to choice for Riven. For example, why are they good on her? What can you achieve and do with these items? What items makes you more of a frontliner in the frontliner build and what items gives you the necessary strengths for the main build and so forth. I feel like you can elaborate on it maybe and maybe even add further information about the builds.
I also realised this a bit late but some of your items colors are very weird, for the items that they showcase. For example, your Infinity Edge text has a bright yellow color but the item itself has more of a darker yellow color. Same goes with some others too like Ninja Tabi having an orange color but they are more so green, Long Sword is blue for some reason, Doran's Shield I can get by, that’s fine and the Doran's Blade is colored as red but the color of the icon is not exactly red afaik. You can always use a color picker to pick colors, there are free ones & easy to use on google if you want to have good matching ones.

Abilities

Maybe change the colors of the titles (e.g. Ki Burst being yellow) and the description of the ability (e.g. some are green colored) to either purple or another color that fits more with the theme you’re using (I think it would fit pretty nicely with Spirit blossom).

Matchups

You do mention that your matchup section was getting relatively large but then again you can shorten all the matchups by using spoilers, but I guess making a separate guide for that is still pretty neat and does the job anyways.

Essential Combos

I feel like you can fit in more videos in here, possibly to not make it so empty of a section. I feel like these combos can probably be transcribed into text as well. Some readers would rather prefer to read information instead of listening & seeing it. I feel like you can accomplish both things by having combos with text explaining them and then having the video at the end for anyone who doesn’t want to read about it etc.

Forging a Lead

Main thing here is that you can probably make a small space between those videos at the end, so they don’t look so cramped up (and maybe even fit in some more?). I feel like you could get some more video content in here maybe since “forging a lead” could mean a lot of different things and feels like a topic that can lead to a lot of information.

Early Game

I feel like this only explains one kind of playstyle for the early stage. Most newer Riven players who might not be the most skilled players might not be able to execute this so-called “cheese” that it’s referred to now. What if this tactic fails? What do you do then? Can you really do this against every single top lane matchup, is there no matchups where you can actually get backfired by doing this tactic? This tactic works the best with Ignite and therefore, what do you do in lane if you have Teleport? Does this strategy still work or nah?

Recovery

You mention that Sunfire Aegis is nasty. However, according to stat sites, Sunfire Aegis has never ever been built once on Riven, so why mention that?
The images are not the same sizes and it’s quite off. I think what you can do is make both warding images the same size (not one image is super small and one very large) and maybe even fit in more kinds of warding locations, what about the other tri-bush on the map that is not hovered by a ward? I would imagine that one is good to ward if you think you’re going to get doved, same logic applies to both tri-bushes in my opinion, not just a way to ward to be safe from ganks. Maybe you can also put these inside of spoilers as well so that they don’t take up as much space as they currently are.
Apart from the fact that the information itself is not very long, I do like how the section is built.

This is probably what I'd be considering as a solid guide with a few mistakes here and there that can be fixed. You've gone far with the gameplay stuff and it shows that time has been put into it and the basic info is mostly there. Other than some of the potential improvements I suggested in my review, I think the biggest goal here for your guide that I'd recommend to focus on is expanding the depth of gameplay information you have. I feel like there are so many more things that you can maybe talk about when it comes to in my opinion, and if it’s not about the champion then even just general talk about how to play top lane would go a really long way.

I hope you find the review helpful and good luck with the guide!

(38) |

I've addressed most of what you've said! Somethings I wasn't sure about since it seemed like I'm just repeating information in one spot of the next. I don't want people to just stop looking at the guide at the cheat sheet. I want them to read the whole thing. Maybe that's not the way things are right now with other guides, but the way they should be.

(326) |

The point I was trying to make with the cheat sheet is the fact that it's mostly used to gather quick information. Most readers likely use guides before they start up a match, they won't have enough time to read through the whole guide before their game starts, this is what the cheat sheet is for. Then likely after the game if they performed well or if they lost but still want to get better at the champion, they'll likely come back and continue reading through the whole guide.

There's absolutely no way to determine if readers want to stop at the cheat sheet or read the entire guide since that's their decision. But most of the time, they will come back if they truly want to improve or learn more about said champion / role.

(101) |

Hey there,

You made an application in the guide review thread, so here it is! One note: I do not play at all, so my knowledge on her is limited.

Click for review

Cheatsheet and build

It could be beneficial to add some notes to the runes where you explicitly mention the type of matchup or some examples of where you would take a particular set of runes.
To expand on the above; you could easily merge the two grasp pages and mention nullifying orb & the MR shard in the notes.
I don’t really understand what is going on in the items part of the cheat sheet, you got three sort-of example builds and some optional rushes. This does not really show me what items I should build nor does it show when to go certain items. A few things that should, in my opinion, be in a cheatsheet:
- Block(s) with (different) core(s)(items you build in 99% of your games.) If some of the cores go with specific rune pages these should be mentioned in the notes. (You can also make separate builds for these).
- Block(s) with situational items. If there are a lot of situational items they should be grouped according some system (defensive – offensive, MR – Armor, whatever you can come up with). These should be accompanied by some notes explaining when each item should be build.
- Some example builds, you already got those.
Onto the specific rune/items: I am a bit skeptical of Grasp of the Undying. I’ve looked around a few stat sites and they all show that you almost always go Conqueror on Riven. Is it actually viable? I recommend expanding on this in the main body of your guide as it seems to be very uncommon.
Why is Legend: Bloodline taken over Legend: Alacrity? Alacrity seems far more logical considering Riven’s passive and it offers more power from the get-go. Not to mention that Riven probably doesn’t even need the lifesteal from bloodline due to conq and DD.
I am extremely skeptical of Sunfire Aegis. This sounds like a huge sacrifice of your damage. If you build Sunfire Aegis are you even a threat to your enemy? Wouldn’t Renekton just laugh at you and murder your jungler instead of you?
E max seems kinda fishy to me, is it actually viable to max your main damage ability last? Just to enhance a rune proc for a stunning total of 10 extra damage?
Are there really that many extremely hard matchups? You might want to add that to the cons (has a lot of counters)

Spells

Is there any particular situation where you go Ignite over Teleport? Try to explicitly list an example in the Ignite description as it currently only describes what it does.

Abilities

Maybe I’m just really stupid but if passive lasts for 5 seconds and Q has a 13 sec cooldown, how are you going to “prime” the passive effect?
Your W descriptions mentions the indicator being horrible, the VFX got updated somewhere previous year. Is this still the case after that update?
Your W description mentions a crazy walljump called “Your Mother”. But sadly I cannot find Your Mother anywhere in the guide…
Maybe I missed something, but at maximum amplification Wind Slash only has a 1.8 bAD ratio. I don’t understand where the 3.0 comes from.

Matchups and Combo’s

On the matchups: I recommend making some kind of TOC so that it becomes easier to see which matchups you got in there. I like the images and such, but it becomes living hell to figure out which matchups you cover. Also a few notes/questions:
- What is a (extremely) short trade? (which abilities in what order)
- What is clipping?
- Counter Strike cooldown isn’t 16 seconds anymore (its 14 at r1)
- Teemo matchup mentions building Youmuu's Ghostblade despite it not being covered in your guide.
- Courage has a 23 second cooldown rather than 24
- Heimerdinger mentions Youmuu’s too
- Five Point Strike range is actually 500, not 300.
- At Vladimir; what is LS 3?
- Tryndamere matchup mentions Randuin's Omen despite it not being featured in the main guide
Outsourcing content to video’s is a nice way to explain some subjects. However, I do not really like seeing “just” a video. Mobafire is focused on written guides after all… Perhaps you can show the 8 combo’s in the video’s in the guide (as in- with icons). With a short explanation when you should look to use each combo or something of that sort. You should definitely keep the video as it explains pretty well how to do all of the combo’s.

Early game

Level 1: I think it would help a great deal if you said where this imaginary line is…
Level 2: I feel like you incorrectly use the term “one-shot”. You imply as if you can 100-0 the enemy champion within a very short timespan. Which certainly will not be the case at level 2. It might also be a good idea to change “most health values” in something like X% health or xxx health.
It looks like this section is written from the viewpoint of maxing Q, there are no mentions whatsoever on what to do when you run grasp & max E. If you go through with E max you should definitely talk about this.

Forging a lead, teamfighting & recovery

At counter jungling you say “If done correctly”, but you forego explaining on how to do such a thing correctly.
At abusing a lead you mention ways to get ahead and say “apply pressure while power farming”. What do you mean here? How do you that as Riven anyway?
I think it is a bit weird to put a Leaguecraft video in your guide after referring to the entire playlist. Perhaps you should put the (most) useful vids from that playlist (that botlane video is very relevant yes) directly in your guide and then refer to the playlist afterwards. I also recommend some kind of tldr; so your readers know what those video's are about.
In the recovery section you say “remember to ward the spots I’ve told you to maintain safety”, but uh, you didn’t tell me any of that!

Presentation

This is in my opinion the best feature of the guide. The coding is clean and neat, it is easy to read what you’re trying to tell your readers. Nothing to say about this.

The main point of improvement is finishing the basics: you should make a section explaining why you go different items and runes on . This is especially important because you run an off-meta setup some of the time (). Besides that there seem to be some gaps between what you think you talked about in this guide and what you actually were talking about. Carefully reread your guide to make sure that you touched on all the topics you wanted to cover!

I hope you are able to do something with the feedback, feel free to reply if you have any questions/remarks.
Anyways, good luck with updating & upgrading your guide and have a nice day!