Nerds Rubick
Description
Rubick is an intelligence hero who can be played as strong caster core. Stealing and mastering enemies' abilities, Rubick becomes strong crowd controlling hero, while also having all routes to deal massive amounts of spell damage. Using enemy spells better than enemies themselves, Rubick creates significant advantage for his own team, while also using Fade Bolt to significantly lower physical damage output by enemy team.
Good usage of Rubick's skillset allowes him to dominate the lane by using Fade Bolt at proper timing. Use your early advantage to start roaming around the map and setup some kills with Telekinesis, while also securing them with Fade Bolt. Surviving in fights is your main priority, so you want to stay as far as possible. After you reach level 15 and get Blink Dagger things will be much easier. Altho, main thing you need to consider - you're not the main damage dealer without proper enemy spells. You're utility core.
Other builds
Starting Items
Skill Build
Skill Priority
Talents
Skill Build Timeline
Main Build
Build Timeline
Lategame Items
Neutral Items
Other significant items
Tooltips
Spells Tooltips
Fade Bolt
Great farming and fighting tool. Also works great while laning since it reduces enemy attack damage and makes it harder to lasthit for enemy hero. Since the duration is almost as long as it's cooldown, you can just keep enemy under damage reduction effect as long as you have mana Try to use it early on to secure some kills for yourself and snowball out of control
Spell Steal
Rubick's signature spell. Keep in mind, your stolen spells have pretty low cast points, so you can cast almost everything faster than your enemies You can also Spell Steal through Spell Immunity
Telekinesis
Telekinesis was nerfed so much, so there's no purpose in leveling it up more than once before maxing out everything else. Altho you can use it to manipulate enemy positioning Try to cast Telekinesis land as soon as possible to win some time for yourself
Arcane Supremacy
Your next most favorite passive in the game. Debuff amplification effect doesn't work for items, but it's still great thing to have since you can steal enemy's disables and debuffs It also makes your Telekinesis a decent ability and massively boosts your damage output
+400 Telekinesis Land Distance
Great talent for controlling mobile enemies
-5s Fade Bolt Cooldown
Better talent most of the time, allowes you to spam Fade Bolt even more
-4s Telekinesis Cooldown
While spell amp talent seems strong, cooldown reduction for Telekinesis is just much stronger tool for crowd controlling, reducing Telekinesis downtime to 4 seconds
Items Tooltips
And the only problem that you need to solve is positioning and Blink Dagger works just fine for it
Rubick loves to trade spells and it will usually result in getting a lot of Wand charges. Altho, you can just replace it with another one Null Talisman. Rush it when you're going to lane against Zeus, Skywrath Mage, Grimstroke or any other spamming hero
Against massive physical damage
Bottle isn't that good nowadays in general, but it works fine for caster cores to solve early mana/health sustain issues. Just try to shave the lane and keep track of rune timings
Additional stats and reliable disable for your team
Defensive solution against silences and slows. It also works great against Bounty Hunter, Slardar and Kunkka
Defensive solution against heroes who will disable your blink right right away or slow you (Riki, Venomancer...)
Makes every stolen ability with aghs upgrade just better, but more importantly it reduces Spell Steal cooldown to 2 seconds
Useful aura and heavy armor boost
Against single target focus (Doom, etc)
Combo with Dagon or to save allies from physical burst
Additional magic damage amplification and armor. Works well when you're playing against massive amounts of physical damage or just want to establish your dominance
Works great in theory with your passive, in reality it's only good when you're dominating
Cheaper but also less reliable disable to have. Massive stats boost
It's not really useful to get another Arcane Boots after you've finished Aether Lens, but you can upgrade Boots of Speed to Tranquil Boots so you will have both mana and health regen sources
For pushing purposes
It's not only helpful because of massige mana boost, but it's also great for stealing spells from a distance which makes getting desired ability easier Use disassembled Arcane Boots to build Lens
Massive surviveability boost and cooldown reduction. Works especially great against teams with long spell cooldowns, but it's just good in general for a spellcaster like Rubick
When you're getting bursted and need to buy some time to get away and turn around