Pangolier + Riki

Why this works

Setting up a kill for Riki often seems like the main goal here, but it's tricky. The idea is that Pangolier uses Rolling Thunder to stun a target, letting Riki drop Smoke Screen and get a free kill. The problem is that Rolling Thunder is chaotic by nature. Pangolier will often knock the stunned target away from Riki, or even bounce them straight out of the Smoke Screen. This forces Riki to use his Blink Strike to chase, and he can lose crucial seconds of lockdown where he needs to be dealing damage. The setup can work, but it frequently falls apart.

Across the game, this means their coordination is unreliable. Early on, a gank can go perfectly or the target can get knocked to safety by mistake. In bigger teamfights, Pangolier is usually focused on rolling through multiple heroes to cause maximum disruption, while Riki is trying to find and isolate a single squishy target. They end up operating independently rather than as a cohesive unit. While they don't actively harm each other's game, they don't provide the consistent setup that other hero pairings might, leading to a very average performance together.