Riven lacks a source of healing or strong defense and must compensate with burst combos. Lead into fights with Broken Wings and Ki Burst, while using Valor to escape and absorb counter-harass.
Riven's Broken Wings locks onto the champion your cursor is over at the time of cast. If you want to move past your opponent, make sure that your cursor is past your opponent as well.
Aqua Prison is a very powerful ability with a long cooldown, take advantage of the situation if Nami misses this ability.
Tidal Wave has a very long range but travels slowly, be aware of when it is coming your way as you can move out of its path.
Try to avoid fighting an opponent affected by Tidecaller's Blessing, it lasts a short duration so waiting it out can help you greatly.
The stat comparisons shown on this page highlight some strategic Riven against Nami counter stats that may help you interpret the distinctions between this set of champs. Riven’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is better than Nami’s KDA ratio of NaN, highlighting that Riven may be more central to her team's team fighting capacity than Nami. This observation is in large part fueled by the difference in kills.
Riven often has a much larger longest kill spree than her matchup does. Commonly, she takes more damage than Nami. This is usually reflective of different amounts of tankyness; however, it can also show that the champion with more health has less mobility and thus is unable to flee from further harm when engaged or poked.
Both League of Legends champs are great. Both champs have their pros and cons. In the game's current meta, Riven usually fairs equally well when playing against Nami, with a 50.4% win rate. As a result, Riven makes an ok counter to Nami.
While Riven does have a higher win rate than Nami, when they face off with one another, Riven also has a much greater level of difficulty that makes her a more time consuming champ to develop with. You should be careful when picking Riven into Namias her relative depth means you may not be able to unleash her full potential without a significant amount of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Riven has some amount of CC and other utility, a similar amount to Nami. This often makes her just as valuable during team fights, especially when trying to counter champions with a ton of burst damage.
While there is not one best champion in League of Legends, in Riven vs Nami matchups, Riven is the better champion with a similar win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your allies during teamfights.
Riven is a decent counter for Nami. Focus your actions on maximizing your gold income and destroying objectives. If you can do that, you should hold your own as Riven against Nami.
To truly master Riven to counter Nami during both the laning and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should keep reading to gather a few extra tips and tricks for this matchup. If you mind the build and stats shown above, you will grow your win rate significantly and be closer to League of Legends pro players.
Riven typically racks up much more CS relative to Nami. Champs who typically don't take many minion kills often don't require much CS to be valuable teammates, such as support champions. They are able to scale properly off of their abilities and first items alone. Yet, champs with a lot of CS, such as hyper-carries, typically have to have several high cost items to be effective. In either situation, try to surpass the values shown here to do well.
The best items to prioritize in your Riven versus Nami build consist of Black Cleaver, Death's Dance, and Eclipse. When Riven combined at least these three items in her build, she did a lot better when fighting Nami than with most other commonly used item sets. In fact, Riven boasted an average winrate of 50.4% battling Nami with these items in her kit.
To have the highest chance of defeating Nami as Riven, you should use the Conqueror, Triumph, Legend: Alacrity, Last Stand, Nimbus Cloak, and Transcendence runes from the Precision and Sorcery rune sets. Of all the rune builds that we analyzed for Riven vs Nami fights, this order of runes resulted in the best win rate. In fact, these runes provided a 50.4% winrate overall.
By default, tips, statistics, and builds on how to beat Nami as Riven are presented for all ranked divisions combined. If you want to scope the stats and builds to an individual player tier, you can use the selection menu located earlier on the page.