Retvik’s Ridiculous Ramble on How To Fix Riven Mods

Simply put, Rivens are bad. They’re a horrible system of RNG. It’s pretty much impossible to get what you want. Not without either huge amounts of luck OR Platinum or, really, both. Rivens are simply random mods for random weapons, 80% of which are unwanted. And as for the other 20%? They fare no better, either getting nerfed later due to disposition or being borderline broken.

Most of the time though, Rivens just suck. Luckily, I have a solution.

Actually, I have two solutions. But we need to discuss the problems first!

Alright, there are two problems here. The first is the randomness. The amount of randomness required to get a riven with good stats for a gun you want is insane. First you need to roll the dice and get a riven of the weapon type you want. Then you have to do a randomly generated challenge to open the riven. Then you get your riven for a random weapon of that type. And then you have to spend tons of Kuva to randomly generate new stats for said riven, in the hopes that the stats get better. Oh, and all the numbers are random too. So even if you DO get an awesome +Damage, +Multishot, +Critical Chance, -Zoom riven for that one gun out of 400 that you like, you could still have awful numbers on it.

However, knowing RNG, you won’t. I’ve rerolled an Ignis riven 100 times now, and all I have is 80% Critical Chance and 60% Multishot. It’s worthless. And frankly, I’m just rerolling it for laughs now. Many rivens for vaguely meta weapons end up like this, because disposition is based not just on how strong weapons are, but how many people use them.

And then there’s the Platinum investment.

People have spent thousands of Platinum for riven mods for specific weapons. It’s a huge market. People want bigger numbers and will use a lot of Platinum to get those bigger numbers. Some rivens go for extraordinary amounts of Platinum. It’s not just people asking for huge sums of Platinum either, in the hopes that someone gullible will come by. Some people are ACTUALLY spending this amount of platinum. And not on super rare collector-tier shit like Artax rivens. Whenever a new, good weapon comes out, prices always skyrocket.

At the same time however, the majority of rivens are legitimately useless. I actually sell shit, unwanted rivens for 5 platinum each if I can’t be bothered to transmute them. Because literally no one wants a riven for the Plasma Sword or the Sheev, right?

Even now, people are spending thousands on Kuva Bramma rivens. But they seem completely unaware that the Kuva Bramma will one day have its disposition nuked, the same way weapons like the Rubico and Ignis did. Thousands of Platinum and Kuva down the drain for a mod that could be replaced by Vigilante Armaments for +90% Multishot.

But how do we fix this?

I don’t think we can fix people spending ungodly amounts of Platinum. But we CAN change riven mods in a way that makes them more viable. Or at least makes them more easy to use, even if they’re not perfect, even if a weapon is a meta one or not.

Solution 1: Make Riven mods only roll for Exlius-like quality-of-life stats

Simply put, rivens don’t make weak weapons better. The amount of effort needed to make, say, a Braton as good as Grakata is too much. But what you CAN do is make that Braton feel good to use, by having rivens alter non-general-damage stats.

Basically, this means changing rivens so they no longer have damage, multishot, critical/status chance and damage and elemental damage on them. Instead, we focus on things like magazine size, reload speed and fire rate. The idea is that a riven mod shouldn’t be game-changing, it should provide a quality-of-life buff to a weapon that would otherwise be ignored. Sure, this would make strong weapons even stronger, but rivens already do that anyway.

With an exilus-based riven mod, you can also just slot it into the Exlius slot in weapons. Those slots don’t really see much use as it is, so we might as well give players a reason to even want Weapon Exilus Adapters.

Solution 2: Turn Rivens into variants of Amalgam mods

Amalgam mods are pretty neat. For example, Amalgam Serration is slightly weaker than normal Serration. But you also get a very nice movement speed boost for using it. But there are also weapon-specific Amalgam mods, like Amalgam Daikyu Target Acquired. This mod can only be used on the Daikyu and gives +75% headshot multiplier, but also a unique buff and a buff to Nikana weapons.

My suggestion here is very simple. Riven mods should work a bit like weapon-specific Amalgam mods, replacing a standard, always-used mod, while being slightly weaker and giving additional benefits. A new Riven mod under this system would come in two parts: the standard stat which is always the same, and two random stats underneath.

The standard stat would be based on one of the handful of mods that appear in every build. For Rifle mods, your standard stat would either be Serration (damage), Split Chamber (Multishot), Point Strike (Critical Chance) or a dual Status/Status Chance mod. The actual number would be slightly weaker, just like a standard Amalgam mod. You would then get two additional, random stats. This ‘amalgam’ riven mod would then replace your Serration or Split Chamber or whatever.

So, not only do you get a variation of a mod you always use, but you also clear some space to be able to use other mods, especially in tightly-packed secondary loadouts. More importantly, because your riven mod ALWAYS has a guaranteed stat you want to use, you can much more easily slot it into your builds and spend far less time rerolling.

Either system is better than what we have now.

There’ll always be some sort of RNG element involved. But what I want to do is reduce that RNG a bit. Just enough so that, even if you get a riven mod for a shit weapon, that riven mod is at least immediately usable.