Unpopular Opinion: The Average Riven Player is Actually the Better Player
Hear me out. I keep seeing people go, "Oh, Riven's OP", "Oh, Time investment in a champ should not be rewarding" "Oh, Riven has too many tools to be so rewarding". Here's what I'm hearing, "Investing time into really learning a champ should provide marginal returns". This is actually garbage. The reason why Riven seems so "OP" is because the average top laner's just suck overall on their champ.
Riven has a ton of counter matchups, however not a ton of people put in the amount of effort the average Riven player does. I'm saying this because I play Riven almost exclusively, however, I'm not a Riven one trick. I'm a Riven main that can play other champs, but let me tell you... I know matchups like the back of my hand when I play Riven.
I know the ins and outs of my champs, builds that's better overall, what to build, when to build it etc, etc. The same can't be said to every other player out there that doesn't exclusively play a champ. Almost every single champ out there, who has a dedicated fan base, can rock a 55%+ winrate if you stick the time and effort into the champ. There's a handful of champs that'll probably never work out like that, however telling people they should not have success after sinking thousands of hours on a champ is horse shit.
Why should I not be rewarded for taking all my bloody time and dumping it in a champ? Most people easily get a 50%+ winrate on simpler champs after like 20 games. So after 2k games of Riven, I, all of a sudden, should not be a validated player for my performance on the champ? Because of what reason?
Don't really wanna make a long thread about Riven, but to get into details of how to actually counter a Riven in lane:
Learn spacing. It's literally like playing a fighting game when vs Riven. Learn how to space pre-6 and she'll most likely never get a lead. People make a ton more mistakes than they think they do when playing vs someone whose designed to punish even the smallest mistakes. Just as easy as it is for Riven to bait people into making mistakes, it's the same concept.
Anything outside of lane phase is all macro based and a player climbing from macro + skill expression is 100% completely fine. There's numerous ways you can nerf Riven, but higher CDs is not one of them. Her damage/CDs, even though people don't want to admit it, is actually on par with just about everyone else.
