What To Do With Rivens? A Simple Riven Guide
Even though I’m not really doing Sorties lately, I still always seem to have a couple of unwanted Riven mods lying around. Riven mods are unique as they can be for any one weapon, have a wide variety of stats and make some weapons insanely powerful. The stats on these mods aren’t set in stone though, they change every so often, whenever the developers think a weapon is too strong or too weak. There’s also the strange fact that you can only ever have a maximum of 90 Riven mods, with Riven slots costing 20 Platinum a piece – the same amount as an entire Warframe.
So this mean you can only have a certain amount of Riven mods at any one time. The question is, when you eventually come to your maximum Riven limit, what do you do with your Rivens?
Well, the first thing you need to do is only keep Rivens for weapons you like and use on a regular basis. This helps keep your collection of Riven mods rather neat and well-trimmed. You want Rivens for weapons you will use all the time. Sure, it’s great having a fancy Riven for the Scoliac, a popular whip weapon, but what’s the point in keeping it if you never use or don’t even OWN the Scoliac? The same goes for a lot of weapons. For ages, I owned Riven mods for the popular weapons but ended up selling them off because I never used them and I wanted to use the space for Rivens I would use.
The same applies if you are lucky enough to have duplicate Rivens. Frankly, there’s no point having duplicates unless said Riven mods fill very different roles. The only example of this I have is my Serious Supra Riven (which has general good stats) and my Fun Supra Riven (which increases the magazine capacity to silly amounts).
The next thing you need to do is think before unveiling your Riven mods. Should you open it or should you sell it as-is. Honestly, it depends on what weapon type it is. Veiled Shotgun Rivens sell for a lot of Platinum, the same with Kitgun Rivens, because there’s a high chance you’ll get something great out of them. With Melee and Rifle Rivens, it’s a little less certain as there are a LOT of weapons that are all-round bad, even with a good Riven. Zaw Rivens are hit and miss, since most Zaw parts can be made good, but the best Zaw parts are locked away behind Plague Star, which only pops up every 6 months or so.
Pistol Rivens though are cheap as chips. Even veiled Pistol Rivens are cheap right now, selling for about 5-10 Platinum, the same price you’d pay for a cheap, unwanted and unveiled Riven. Open it or don’t open it, if you want to make Platinum, it won’t sell for much, but there are a lot of good secondary weapons that you could get something you love.
Next, you need to consider what stats you want. Luckily this is pretty easy. Damage, Multishot (guns only), Attack Speed and Range (melee only) are ALWAYS good things. Critical Chance and Critical Damage are the second best things and Status Chance is also a good thing on most weapons, but only if the default stat of your weapon is 10-15% or higher. Critical Chance on a weapon with a 1% chance to randomly crit is not worth it at all.
After that, elemental damage is always preferable. Toxin is probably the best element (as it builds into Gas, Corrosive and Viral, all good elements) but Heat and Electric are good as well. Cold’s not great but as a secondary element, it works nicely. Slash, Impact and Puncture are not really worth it. On melee weapons, Critical Chance on Slide Attacks and Combo Duration are good on crit-based melees but it depends on what the weapon is – critical chance on slide attacks is wasted on weapons with very small range or sparring and fist weapons. Otherwise, other stats are personal preference.
Ideally though, you’ll want a harmless negative on your Riven, because having a negative means you’ll get bigger positive numbers. Harmless negatives are things like -Zoom, -Ammo Maximum and -Magazine Capacity that don’t otherwise affect the damage stats of the weapon.
Finally, you need to consider how you want to get rid of unwanted Riven mods. There’s several ways you can do this: You can trade the Rivens for platinum or other fancy things; you can dissolve the unwanted Riven mods for Endo; or you can get four Rivens and transmute them into one new, unveiled Riven mod.
Out of these three methods, I prefer transmuting my unwanted Rivens, but that does rely on me regularly doing Eidolon Hunts, killing all three Eidolons for the chance to get Riven transmuters. This might not be available for a lot of people. Selling unwanted Rivens for Platinum is always an option since there are people who will buy crappy Rivens in bulk so they can transmute them into Veiled Rivens. You have to be MR8 or higher to do this though. If you’ve managed to obtain a Riven before doing the War Within, you can’t sell it and your only option is to dissolve the Riven.
Sadly, dissolving Rivens into Endo doesn’t really seem like a good idea. Unless you have pumped huge amounts of Kuva into your Riven, rerolling it multiple times, you will only get about 200 Endo. This should always be the last thing you do when trying to get rid of Rivens.
So yeah, it’s not complicated, but it’s worth taking a pause before you go and open that Riven mod…