Riven Rework Thoughts
I like Riven as much as the next person. Huge skill ceiling, practically impossible to master, and incredibly satisfying when all her animation cancelling is done juuuust right. However, that's where the issue is: animation cancelling.
Animation cancelling is core to her kit, to the point that any nerfs put onto her is based off of a player who can easily do all of her animation cancels. To any new player who picks her up, it isn't apparent that they need to animation cancel or what animations to cancel in order to improve. This is different in comparison to champs like Yasuo, Zed or LeBlanc, where upon reading what their abilities do, you can play one game with them and pretty obviously see where you can improve on them, versus watching an hour of Riven video's or alternatively, play tons of hours to figure out all of her animation cancels.
Furthermore, animation cancelling is what separates a bad Riven from a good Riven and arguably, a successful one. Considering that animation cancelling is so crucial to her, it's baffling that this information about her is not readily available from Riot and is reliant upon the player base to ultimately figure it out and pass on the knowledge. Also, successful animation cancels provide very little visual reward to the player and no realisation to an enemy (other than them dying faster).
So I propose making animation cancelling actually part of her kit, rather than general knowledge players should have before playing her. Make all of her animations longer but each of them can be cancelled by any of her abilities and make it so the actual cancelling of abilities is what procs her passive (and she gets a slight flash of green for every passive stack). She's still combo reliant, still needing to animation cancel to be effective, still requiring a high skill cap along with quick reflexes and fast thinking, only now when you play her, it's easy to tell where you can improve and what you could of done differently.
These are just my thought's and opinions, feel free to post any agreements, disagreements or just your opinion in general.
