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Greetings Tenno!
Players who have completed The War Within quest will be familiar with Riven Mods. These special weapon Mods with randomized stat rolls offer powerful customization options from the mysterious Cephalon Samodeus. Those who have been with us a bit longer may have noticed that the stats on these Mods can change over time - we wanted to outline the reasons for that, and share some Riven facts you may not already know!
Each weapon has a unique “Disposition”, applied as a multiplier on your Riven’s stat rolls. Any weapon that you own a Riven for will have Riven Disposition “dots” in the Arsenal, indicating strength - the higher the number, the stronger the stats. 
These numbers are curated by our developers during each Prime Access release, to help gently maintain the top-end balance of weapon power levels. Since Rivens can be high value trade commodities, we have developed a number of rules to keep things as fair as possible, so everybody knows what to expect.
Here’s everything you need to know about Riven Dispositions!
THE BASICS:
- Riven Dispositions generally span from 0.5 to 1.5. The Arsenal dots are not a static representation of these numbers, but representative of percentages - so a weapon with 1 dot is in the bottom 20% of Dispositions, while a weapon with 5 dots is in the top 20%.
- Newly released weapons start at the minimum of 0.5. This gives us the opportunity to see how a weapon performs in players’ hands, so that we can make educated changes instead of starting at an artificially higher number. This saves us, and players, from having to constantly reduce new weapons after release.
- Although Rivens can be equipped to an entire “weapon family”, Dispositions are given to each individual weapon. You can equip the same Riven Mod onto Braton, Braton Prime and Braton Vandal, but the stats of the Riven may differ slightly depending on which weapon you are modding.
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In the Riven Cycle screen, you can see how stats differ between weapon types you own by changing the option in the bottom right.
- We will only make adjustments to Riven Dispositions during Prime Access releases, roughly once every 3 months. Since these updates release simultaneously across all platforms, this makes it impossible for traders to gain an unfair advantage using knowledge gained from other platforms.
THE NUMBERS:
- For each set of adjustments, we generate a “recommended” value for each weapon. This number is based 50% on usage stats from players at high Mastery Rank, and 50% from an “internal ranking”.
- These internal rankings are maintained by Digital Extremes developers based on a weapon’s perceived strength, and are adjusted when opinions change, or when a stronger variant of a weapon is released. Internal rankings are applied per family of weapon - this allows us to keep Dispositions within a family relatively close to each other, to avoid a situation where a weaker weapon becomes the stronger choice once a Riven is applied.
- Any change will adjust the number by at least 0.05. If the suggested change is smaller, then we leave the number as-is.
- We will never reduce a Disposition by more than 0.2 at one time. There is no upper limit on how much we increase a weapon’s Disposition, allowing us to bring a new weapon up to speed quickly if it is underperforming.
- All Disposition changes are reviewed by several people within the company. Changes are only approved if we believe they are good for the game overall.
Warframe has a long history of reworks and system changes that can shift the power dynamic drastically over time. This is why Rivens are an ever-changing system: Tenno should have a reason to use their favorite weapons, instead of choosing solely based on power. With the knowledge that these Riven Mods can change over time, we encourage Tenno to remain flexible and experiment in response to changes, to truly master their Arsenals even further.
Thanks for reading Tenno!