FOTM Report: Essence Reaver Riven

This build sports an absurd 50% cooldown, so be sure to pick up Transcendence to avoid wasting stat points. That aside, this playstyle takes full advantage of the newly reduced cost on Essence Reaver and gives Riven more attack speed than usual. This maximizes her Conqueror rune usage and ends up dealing a lot more damage than other builds. Check out how to play it below! How to Play:
Abilities: Q, E, W then prioritize R > Q > E > W | Summoner Spells: Flash + Ignite | Starting Items: Long Sword + 3 Potions | Core Items: Essence Reaver, Stormrazor, Ionian Boots, Black Cleaver, Ravenous Hydra, Guardian Angel




This build sports an absurd 50% cooldown, so be sure to pick up Transcendence to avoid wasting stat points. That aside, this playstyle takes full advantage of the newly reduced cost on Essence Reaver and gives Riven more attack speed than usual. This maximizes her Conqueror rune usage and ends up dealing a lot more damage than other builds. Check out how to play it below!

Maximum Cooldown

This build sports an absurd 50% cooldown, so be sure to pick up Transcendence to avoid wasting stat points. That aside, this playstyle takes full advantage of the newly reduced cost on Essence Reaver and gives Riven more attack speed than usual. This maximizes her Conqueror rune usage and ends up dealing a lot more damage than other builds. Check out how to play it below!

How to Play

Abilities: Q, E, W then prioritize R > Q > E > W
Summoner Spells: Flash + Ignite
Starting Items: Long Sword + 3 Potions
Core Items: Essence Reaver, Stormrazor, Ionian Boots, Black Cleaver, Ravenous Hydra, Guardian Angel

Rune Setup

How It Works

Single Combo Q Refresh
After popping ultimate, Riven's basic attacks gain Essense Flare from Essence Reaver. This gives her a 20% cooldown every time she hits her basic attacks. This means that if you get an auto attack off between every Q, your Q is up almost the entire duration of the Flare. With Essence Flare's 50% bonus attack speed, this becomes almost guaranteed.

Attack Speed + Conqueror + Essence Flare
There are few things that scale better than attack speed and Conqueror. The added bonus from Essence Flare and Stormrazor second item makes Riven insanely powerful if she's weaving her auto-attacks between each Q like a good Riven player should.

Potential Pitfalls

More Emphasis on Auto-Attack Cancelling

This build basically doesn't work if you don't weave auto-attacks between each Q. On the other hand, if you can't do that then you probably don't have any business playing Riven to begin with. Despite this, certain attack speed slows like Malphite's E may greatly impact your damage output if you're not used to the timing.

Squishier Champion
This Riven build focuses more on sustained trades, but continues to be extremely squishy. It works incredibly well against tank champions with low damage output but high health. However, it may have trouble against high burst top laners like Irelia.

Conclusions

This version of Riven is very fun to play and is extremely good against tank champions. However, I would be wary of using it against high damage, high CC champions since well...those are just plain broken.

Suggested Tier: Tier 1

What do you think about this pick? Fancy trying it out? Comment below!