Retvik’s Ridiculous Guide to Rolling and Selling Rivens

Riven mods. All the potential in the world to make your favourite weapons amazing, locked away behind a wall of randomness and horrible Kuva. They’re also locked away behind a limited amount of space, with a base amount of 15 Riven Mod slots, with more riven slots costing you 60 platinum for a measly 3 slots. They’re expensive and annoying and disappointing and if you want to make use of them, not end up with an inventory of crap or make some platinum, you need to learn how and when to get rid of them.

Let’s make things clear right now. Most riven mods are shit. They are for weapons no one likes and often have shitty base stats. Or maybe they have average stats. But most of the time, it’s hard to sell your riven mods. No one really wants them. Now that riven transmutation is available, then maybe crap rivens will be desired, but even then, riven transmutors are in short supply, only available by killing the third and biggest Eidolon. Transmutors aren’t trade-able either.

There are several ways we can look at this.

The first way is whether you just want to make some platinum right here, right now. If you just want cold, hard platinum and don’t want to mess around with riven mods at all, don’t unveil your mods. Veiled riven mods always sell for a pretty standard amount of platinum. Shotgun rivens are the most expensive because they’re the rarest. Rifle and pistol rivens are around about the same price. Prices tend to go up when new weapons are released, as people want to unveil rivens in the chance to get rivens for said new weapons as they come out. This is a pretty easy, guaranteed way to make sure you definitely get some platinum.

The second way to look at this is trying to sell rivens for good weapons. Really, the term ‘good weapon’ is very up in the air and it all depends on what you like, so this is a bit… open to interpretation. On top of the recent balance changes and weapon buffs, the term ‘good weapon’ has opened up a lot. This comes in two forms: weapons that are considered meta (e.g. Tigris, Hek, Soma, Atterax) and weapons that are normally just meh but are AMAZING with rivens (e.g. the Miter, sniper rifles, the Scoliac, most shotguns). There are also some weapons that fall into both categories, like the Opticor and the Sicarus Prime, where they have a high disposition (i.e. chance at getting high stats) AND are already insanely powerful.

Examples of weapons that are powerful as they are and kinda get better with rivens	Examples of Weapons that are considered mid-tier but are insanely strong with rivens	Weapons that can make you well off just by unveiling one and can make you a huge amount of plat if they have good stats
Soma, Tigris, Hek, Atterax, Galatine, Grakata, Twin Grakata, Akstiletto, Lesion, Orthos	The majority of shotguns apart from the Convectrix, Phage and Sweeper (e.g. Strun, Astilla), weaker Sniper Rifles and Bows, Braton, Gorgon (since it got buffed)	Scoliac, Lecta, Arca Plasmor, Corinth, Sicarus, Opticor, Zenistar, Guandao, Lenz, Kohm

With rivens for these weapons, you have two choices: sell the rivens unrolled for a good amount of platinum, or reroll until you get an AMAZING set of stats. The question is whether you want to put a lot of effort and Kuva into rerolling a riven got a good weapon, or whether you just want to get rid of the riven mod and make your platinum now.

Amazing stats depends on the weapon – critical damage weapons will want Critical Chance, Critical Damage and either Damage or Multishot as stats, while status weapons will want Status Chance, Damage and Multishot on them.  Melee rivens, as well as +critical chance/damage or +status chance, generally want +damage, +range, +attack speed and, for critical damage rivens, +critical chance on slide attacks.

Funnily enough, the best rivens actually have three positives and a negative on them, and the negative is normally something like -zoom, -ammo maximum or some other stat that otherwise wouldn’t affect the weapon. If you have a negative stat on your weapon, it means your positive stats will be higher. For example, a riven mod with +damage and +ammo maximum only will have lower damage and ammo overall than a riven mod with +damage, +ammo maximum and -reload speed. Of course, the numbers are all random, so this isn’t 100% true, but most of the time a negative means better positives.

But the likelihood of getting a riven with amazing stats is kinda low. Sure, with the Sicarus, you definitely could because it’s got a high disposition, meaning it’s more likely to get higher numbers. But most of the time it’s going to take you a billion rerolls to get something amazing. If you plan on keeping the riven for yourself, then you can keep rerolling, but if you plan on selling your riven, if you don’t have anything good after 20 rerolls, it’s probably better to sell it – buyers aren’t fans of high numbers of rolls, but they will still be happy to buy something if it’s got a nice set of stats anyway.

Some people talk about ‘flipping’ riven mods, i.e. buying somewhat cheap, unrolled rivens and rerolling them into rivens with superb stats, but I really recommend against this. It only really works with semi-popular rivens and the chances of rerolling into something amazing in under 20 rolls are tiny. Plus, the price you end up paying for mediocre rivens for good weapons can be pretty high so unless you get super lucky, you don’t make much anyway.

All this talking about selling and I haven’t mentioned where to actually sell mods. And sadly, the in-game trade chat really isn’t a good place to sell your rivens. Funnily enough, I sold most of my rivens on Riven Hub on the unofficial official Warframe Discord channel. You have to do a few things to access the Riven Hub chat room, but it’s a pretty useful place, complete with people and bots to help you grade and price your rivens. For good-but-not-absolutely-amazing rivens you want to sell, Warframe Trader is a good place, more regularly visited compared to riven.market. It takes a long time to sell rivens on Warframe Trader but assuming you’re not overpricing your stuff, you will eventually someone to buy your rivens.

Despite the in-game chat being a bad place to sell, it IS a good place to buy a riven for a not-super-popular weapon. Simply post that you want a riven for a weapon and people will almost certainly come to you.

Finally, there’s selling rivens for bad weapons. This mainly includes things like the myriad of crappy melee weapons like the Heat Dagger and Plasma Sword, as well as rivens for the non-Helios Sentinel weapons. There are collectors and eccentrics out there, but they’re few and far between. You won’t have much luck selling bad rivens on places like Warframe Trader, but if you offer to sell bad, unrolled (or low-rolled) rivens for around 5-10 platinum a pop, you will get rid of them, and will much more likely get rid of them quicker when riven transmutors become more common.

That being said, if you get, for example, an Akzani riven that gives you +250% damage, it might sell for a bit more and is worth holding on to for the sort of trader willing to buy that sort of thing. But the stats generally have to be pretty damn good for that to happen.

But if you get a riven for a bad weapon with bad stats that you really just don’t like using, you honestly might be better off just turning it into Endo or credits, especially if you’re running out of riven space. Some rivens just won’t sell. If you’ve been sitting on a riven mod for a bad weapon, trying to sell it, feel free to keep on trying to sell it, but if you need more capacity for riven mods, just sell the damn thing.

At the end of the day, as long as you do sorties, you’ll eventually get more rivens, so it doesn’t matter if you destroy a riven no one wants anyway.

My biggest tip of all? It’s better to always be at 14/15 riven mod capacity than it is to have to dissolve a riven mod after doing a sortie due to lack of space.