In this guide we will only cover the bare necessities that are needed for understanding Riven mods in warframe, to evaluate their performance, and estimate their cost.

Vocabulary

Slottable Riven:

Slotting is when you equip something to the mod slots. A Riven mod in Warframe could be considered NOT slot-able when its desirable stats are less than conventional mods due to the fact that weapons have limited mod slots available. If a Riven mod provides weaker or less desirable stats compared to other conventional mods, players should choose to prioritize conventional mods that offer better benefits. In this case, the Riven mod may be considered not slottable as it does not provide enough value to justify using up a valuable mod slot.

Weapon’s Riven Disposition:

Riven disposition in Warframe refers to the strength of a specific weapon’s Riven mods, or rather, the amount of stats that their Rivens have.
The disposition of a weapon is determined by its popularity and usage among players.
If a weapon is widely used and considered powerful, its disposition will be lower, meaning Riven mods for that weapon will have less impact. And if a weapon is less popular or deemed weaker, its disposition will be higher, allowing Riven mods to have a greater effect.

Godroll or Groll Rivens

Sometimes a Riven can have the perfect positive stats, and the perfect negative stat.
God-roll Riven mods have 3 perfect performance-related positive attributes, and either free or beneficial negative attribute.

Stat grade, weight or Score:

Each attribute on every Riven can not only vary depending total number of attributes and its disposition, but they can also vary in a certain range completely at random.
The grading for the attribute, while does affect the performance slightly, is in vast majority of cases completely irrelevant.
Its effect in performance is most often negligible, and in pricing it only comes into effect when dealing with god rolls.

Free or Harmless Negative:

Negative attributes on a Riven mod (which appear when there are either 3 or 4 attributes) could potentially not harm the weapon’s performance at all.
A well-known example of this is -zoom. Keep in mind that certain negatives are actually BETTER than these, we will cover this extensively later.

Understanding Diminishing Returns

Put concisely, some stats on a riven are not great because there are too many ways of increasing it in an effective manner.
A good example of this is the +damage attribute, which on a lot of weapons can be achieved in abundance by many means such as warframe abilities, weapon arcanes, warframe arcanes, and weapon mods.

Understanding Status

In Warframe, the effectiveness of a weapon is partially determined by its ability to apply desirable status effects on enemies. From the physical statuses, slash is most loved because its damage bypasses armor.

Best element?

Naturally, a +toxin on your Riven would be the best elemental stat to have, given it’s ability to contribute to the two most effective ways of building weapons (viral & corrosive).
However, don’t be disheartened when your Riven has cold or heat.

Physical Status

When a weapon has a 100% status chance, it means that every projectile fired will trigger a single status effect.
However, the specific status effect that is triggered is determined by chance, based on the ratio between the numerical amount of different statuses present on the weapon.
For example, if your weapon has 100% status chance, 300 puncture, and 700 corrosive, there will be a 70% chance your bullets will trigger corrosive, and a 30% chance to trigger puncture.

This is where the -impact and -puncture attributes on Riven mods come into play.
By reducing the amount of impact and puncture damage on a weapon, the chance of triggering desirable status effects such as slash or corrosive increases.

To reiterate, by reducing impact and puncture damage, the proportion of desirable statuses increases, thus increasing their likelihood to apply.

Likewise, undesirable statuses such as +puncture on your Riven will harm it’s performance and consistency.

Understanding Exceptions

There are many cases and weapons that are exceptions to the norm of modding, and therefore, Riven performance evaluation.
For example, on weapons like Acceltra or Zhuge prime, the +Punch Through attribute is HORRIBLE, as it completely ruins their intended explosive damage.
There are also gimmicks which involves specific attributes, for example, on VECTIS, the -magazine capacity attribute is GREAT as it allows the weapon to be more consistent with specific mods.

Attributes or “stats” on Rivens are either positive or negative.

The evaluation below doesn’t involve any subjective use of the weapon for any specific mission, but rather everything, in a general sense.

Categorization into Values

We’ve categorized them based on their GENERAL value into 5 levels or as we call them “value”s.

HORRIBLE

These stats can extremely worsen the performance, sometimes to the extent of making the Riven not slottable.

Bad

These stats harm the weapon’s performance to a very noticeable degree.

meh

These stats are never needed, and while not hurting the weapon’s performance by much, they do reduce the numerical amount of the other stats on the Riven.
They could always be better; no one would go out of my way to want these, unless they’re thinking about Quality or Life or strange interactions.

Good

These stats benefit the weapon’s performance without much drawback, but are typically overshadowed by better stats, or certain mods and buff abilities that offer them in abundance.

GREAT

These stats are amazing on most weapons, and typically, they greatly improve the performance.
GREAT negatives are colloquially regarded as harmless or free negatives, but they’re still worse than -puncture and -impact.

Cheat Sheet

Here is the general evaluation cheat sheet of Riven stats:

Prefix	Suffix	Attribute	Positive	Negative
Acri	Tis	Critical Damage	GREAT	HORRIBLE
Crita	Cron	Critical Chance	Good	HORRIBLE
Sati	Can	Multishot	GREAT	HORRIBLE
Visi	Ata	Damage	Good	HORRIBLE
Hexa	Dex	Status Chance	Good	HORRIBLE
Croni	Dra	Attack Rate	meh	Bad
Toxi	Tox	Toxin Damage	GREAT	n/a
Igni	Pha	Fire Damage	Good	n/a
Geli	Do	Cold Damage	Good	n/a
Vexi	Tio	Electric Damage	Meh	n/a
Manti	Tron	Corpus Damage	Good	Bad
Argi	Con	Grineer Damage	Good	Bad
Pura	Ada	Infested Damage	meh	meh
Sci	Sus	Slash Damage	meh	Bad
Insi	Cak	Puncture Damage	Bad	GREATER
Magna	Ton	Impact Damage	Bad	GREATER
Laci	Nus	Combo Chance	meh	HORRIBLE
Tempi	Nem	Combo Duration	meh	Bad
Pleci	Nent	Slide Critical	meh	GREAT
Exi	Cta	Finisher Damage	meh	Good
Para	Um	Initial Combo	Good	n/a
Forti	Us	Combo Efficiency	meh	Bad
Locti	Tor	Melee Range	Good	HORRIBLE
Lexi	Nok	Punch Through	meh	n/a
Feva	Tak	Reload Speed	meh	Bad
Conci	Nak	Flight Speed	meh	Good
Arma	Tin	Magazine Capacity	Bad	meh
Deci	Des	Status Duration	meh	meh
Zeti	Mag	Weapon Recoil	Bad	GREAT
Hera	Lis	Zoom	Bad	GREAT
Ampi	Bin	Maximum Ammo	Bad	GREAT

Understanding Trends

The most important factor in pricing a Riven is how much the players are willing to invest to get their own.

While this sounds very rudimentary, it is extremely important to keep in mind that the player’s willingness is VERY MUCH affected by the current trends.

There are generally 5 weapon trend categories, all of which can be used to your advantage:

Elite Farming Strategies

These involve a weapon being used in an effective (typically player-friendly) farming strategy, and then propagated through YouTube or by chatter.
An example of this has been Ogris with the Nightwatch napalm mod, but it has since been nerfed.

YouTube Videos

Unfortunately, the most impactful trend type, which typically involves a youtuber making a tier list of weapons or publishing a review or build guide on a weapon.
A notorious example of this is the demand for Phantasma Rivens, which is commonly attributed to the creator KnightMareFrame’s favor toward the weapon.

New Weapon Hype

Quite self-explanatory. This trend comes with almost every single new weapon.

KNOWN META

This trend involves the weapons used in the currently known and accepted meta.
Keep in mind, this trend in no way, shape or form affects the actual meta, but only the ones that are well documented and known. And remember, consider riven pricing and disposition when discussing meta weapons, as currently, a lot of weapons considered meta, aren’t actually meta due to riven costs or disposition.

Necro / Idiocy

These trends are typically caused by misinformation, resurfaced old strategies, or regurgitated content regarding outdated, inapplicable or simply wrong strategies.
A notorious example of this is Ripkas, which is used to make the weapon strong enough to kill enemies and duplicate corpses (and then Desecrate) through its amalgam mod, however, you do not need to kill with ripkas itself, because certain warframe ability-affected kills (for example, Zephyr tornado) still trigger its effect even with other weapons, without requiring a direct kill with the weapon

Pricing God Rolls

Pricing Grolls is VERY subjective and reliant on the current trends.
Recommendation is to just list them at a price similar to other Grolls.

Pricing Good Rivens

A- If your Riven has no negatives, count the Good & GREAT attributes on your Riven mod.

If your Riven does have a negative, note the value of the negative, and count the Good & GREAT attributes on your Riven mod.

B- Open https://warframe.market/auctions

C- Look at ONLINE Rivens of that weapon (and if your Riven had a negative attribute, enable “Has Negative” in the filters)

See at what price COULD you buy a Riven for that weapon with the same number and values of your Attributes.

D- List your Riven at a similar price.

Pricing Quirks

When analyzing the market, ignore clueless players selling GREAT Rivens for too cheap, or buy them yourself.

Polarities have value themselves; typically madurai > naramon > vazarin.

To be quick at pricing your riven, skim through the listings to find a riven that has a negative attribute of the same value as yours, and then check its positive attributes.
If their positive attributes’ values are worse than yours, then keep looking, until you find a similar or better Riven.

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