FOTM Report: Riven

Always a popular pick, Riven's seen more usage and success than normal these last few patches. Despite receiving nothing but nerfs since Season 4, Riven's greatest weaknesses in solo queue have been eliminated by the shifting meta and nerfs on other champions.

An extremely powerful duelist from early to midgame through her auto attack resetting skills and strong mobility, Riven has always been a strong lane bully. She trades excellently throughout the game, and scales defensively by simply building pure damage and CDR.

Late game, her sustained damage with Hydra allows her to easily survive through smaller skirmishes to clean up, and crushes towers in split pushes/post aces as a naturally high damage-based champion.

In solo queue, Riven's major weakness is generally the skillcap and knowledge required to be the first engager on a team, as she's fairly squishy if the enemy team manages to CC and kill her before she can put out her burst damage.

In higher Elos, most Rivens rely on using a combination of flash and her gap closers to burst enemies down before they have time to escape or react. However, for most divisions Riven player mechanics aren't high enough to do this consistently without counterplay.

Despite receiving no buffs lately, Riven did gain one very specific, very strong benefit from the last few patches: the shift to the Jungle Cinderhulk meta.

The Cinderhulk meta means that there's a strong return of tanky "support" type junglers. These junglers generally pack a large amount of CC and bulk, including champions like Sejuani, Amumu, Nautilus, and Maokai. 

With champions like these almost guaranteed on the team, Riven players have a much easier time playing Riven into almost any team composition, since the team will already have a strong front line and CC to be used for consistent initiation and peel.

This meta shift may actually have had an even stronger benefit to Riven's top lane performance than the presence of strong tanky junglers back on the rift.

Riven naturally crushes early game and relies on Flash to close the gap and take down enemies before they can get away. However, with many top laners not running flash, it's beyond easy for Riven players to go all in between levels 1 and 3 and guarantee a kill. They don't even need to wait for the enemy flash to be down since well...the enemy doesn't have one. 

Even better, enemies will TP back to lane so Riven can pick up another kill faster than usual, as shown by Shyvana's impressive 39.2% win rate and Dr. Mundo's slightly less impressive 40.9% win rate against Riven.

Since the latest patch's changes to Cinderhulk, I guess we'll see whether the top lane match-ups or the jungler presence has had a bigger impact to Riven's success as of late.