Hey y'all, Konduit here. There's a lot to talk about today, so without further ado let's dive right into it.

Every champion in League has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Improving your play on a particular champion involves understanding what these pros and cons are - but that's nothing new, I'm sure you've heard this before. Moving a little deeper into the realm of champion design and development, one of the potential strengths that a champion can have is Reliability of Execution.

This is just a fancy term I've come up with that basically asks the question: "How often does the champion perform at or near 100% effectiveness?" To illustrate this principle, let's start at a micro level and move our way up. Take for example a skillshot vs. a targeted ability; skillshots in League of Legends have several unique properties (on principle, the designers have been very consistent with this). They typically have a longer range, are allocated a greater power budget in the champion's kit (relative to standard, targeted abilities), and are more flexible in their use - you can use them to poke, check bushes, and launch them from over terrain. Targeted abilities, on the other hand, are comparatively much blander; you just point and click, and the ability fires off - you don't have the additional flexibility that a skillshot provides.

Ryze's snare is one of the most reliable crowd control effects in the game. There's no dodging Rune Prison! (Image Credit to surrender@20)

Though skillshots - as described above - are certainly powerful, they simply don't have the reliability that targeted abilities possess. Targeted abilities are just that - they can't miss (Fizz, Vladimir, etc. notwithstanding). You can always be sure of your payoff when you use Ryze's Rune Prison; your opponent can't dodge it, there's no potential for you to miss, or to fall for jukes - your opponent gets snared, every time.

A champion with a high Reliability of Execution is one that operates at or near maximum effectiveness basically all the time. Characters like Swain, Annie, Malzahar, Mundo, Tahm Kench, Sona, Nasus etc. all are extremely reliable when performing their roles. Contrast these champions with Leblanc, Ezreal, Lux, Ahri, Cassiopeia, Zed, and Yasuo and the difference is palpable: the former is a collection of easy to pick up, consistent within their range of influence, focused champions. The latter is a group of extremely flexible, mobile, but mechanical and skillshot-reliant champions.

Now you might be thinking, "Sure, I can see how Reliability of Execution is important. You want to be effective as much as you can. But as you get better, won't landing skillshots become more reliable?" Well, yes and no. Certainly, as you become more and more proficient mechanically on a micro-intensive champion, you'll hit more and more of your skillshots; but as you play more and more, your opponents will become proficient in playing around and dodging your skillshots whenever possible. Obviously, at the professional level, champions like Ahri, Zed, etc. are seeing play, so it's not as though being skillshot reliant is a significant detriment. In fact, as we'll discuss, it can be a great strength; but it comes with the distinct drawback of your champion not always performing at 100% effectiveness, as sometimes your abilities will miss or be dodged.

Swain's abilities are extremely reliable, almost all being targeted or auto-targeting. His W, while a skillshot, is set up with a targeted slow.

Reliability of execution is an important consideration not only when selecting your champion, but also with regards to the decisions you make in-game. When considering whether to fight your lane opponent, how many of your abilities will you have to land in order to win? What if your opponent dodges or plays around a skillshot? In essence, how perfectly do you have to play the fight to win - what's your burden of execution? Compare this with a scenario in which you're miles ahead of the enemy team, and you can two shot the enemy tank with your auto-attacks; in this case, your burden of execution is basically non-existent! But if in that fight in lane, you're (hypothetically) playing a champion that simply requires you to press all your buttons and click the target, the burden of execution would also be zero - you know you'd win every time, because there's no room to be outplayed. This is the principle I call the "Burden of Execution."

In some cases, it's advisable to pick a champion almost solely because there is low burden/high reliability of execution. Against Vayne, who can tumble, dodge, and stealth, hitting skillshots is difficult. But for all her slipperiness, Vayne can't avoid a Rune Prison, Malzahar Void Grasp, or Swain's targeted abilities. In this case, your champion's reliability (and lack of skillshots) is a critical advantage against your opponents' team composition.

In each individual match, there are so many variables to consider when striving for improvement; there's macro strategy, micro execution, team communication, farming, etc. By playing a champion with a high reliability of execution, you're minimizing the chance that mechanical error will cost you the game (i.e., missing a skillshot-based ability that you needed to hit in order to win the critical game-winning teamfight: certainly an extreme case, but it illustrates the point). Perhaps even more important is that it frees up your headspace and allows you to focus much more on macro-level decision making. When execution of a play is an afterthought (e.g. walking up to an opponent as Swain and unloading all of your abilities), you have a great deal more time to consider whether the play can be made, whether it's correct to attempt it, and what could potentially throw a wrench in your plan. When less of a percentage of your play's success relies on you executing things perfectly, you can be more confident in each decision that you make, knowing that once you've made it, there's a very high chance for success. The reverse is also true - if there's no potential for you to 'outplay' your opponent, then you'll very quickly determine that you probably won't be able to win the fight.

Ahri is extremely flexible, gifted with mobility and tricky, powerful skillshots. However, her effectiveness is greatly diminished if her abilities whiff.

Of course, champions like Zed and Ahri have a great deal of 'outplay' potential, so they may be able to take risky fights, even when behind, and come out the victor. Characters which are more flexible have the distinct advantage of being able to create plays that are much more dynamic (as opposed to the binary pattern of walking up to your opponent as Swain); mobility, long-range skillshots, and a bit of trickery enable these kinds of plays, all traits which characters that are more "reliable" tend to lack.

As a side note, it's interesting to observe the matchups between mechanics-focused champions and macro-focused (i.e. not mechanically intensive, instead more decision-focused) champions. Two mechanics-focused champions going at it is one of the flashiest and exciting events to watch in League - there's potential for either side to win. A mechanics-focused character and a macro-focused character in an engagement is a situation which places a great deal of pressure on the former to execute perfectly. A missed (or dodged) skillshot will swiftly be punished by the latter's reliability. A battle between two macro champions is heavily decided by raw stats and innate champion traits (take for example Trundle vs. Mundo).

Tahm is mechanically straightforward (intended by the designers), but his decision trees (e.g. whether to eat an enemy or an ally) can be quite complex.

You might be thinking that macro-focused champions are boring, and require less player skill. Well, yes and no. Mechanically, they are far simpler than their execution-reliant counterparts... but the decision-making and judgement required to play these champions optimally is extremely skill testing. Without the flexibility of being able to retreat with a mobility skill, champions like Xin Zhao and Swain have to decisively pick their engagements and live with the consequences. What's particularly awesome is that Riot has designed the game such that neither of the groups is definitively better than the other - each champion's strengths and weaknesses shine separately from how difficult they are to play to maximum effectiveness. But, that very quality (how difficult they are to play) is also a strength (or weakness) in and of itself.

That's a lot to take in - a lot of theory, some abstract concepts - hopefully it got you thinking. Keep this crucial tradeoff in mind when picking your champion - flexibility vs. reliability of execution. Flexibility affords numerous, extremely valuable benefits; but if your team composition can perform nearly as well with a champion that has a high reliability of execution, consider taking the latter!

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed the article. If you'd like to discuss anything League, have comments/feedback on this article, or just want to say hi, feel free to tweet me @k0nduit (with a zero instead of an 'o') and I'll get back to you.

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