Rubick, the Grand Magus, is going to magically appear onto Dota 2’s roster this Firday in the latest content patch, along with a few changes to the UI, an additional tournament mode that lets you pay for in depth spectator features, and the announcer packs. But feature’s be damned, there’s a new wizard to make everyone without fancy abilities get slightly jealous.
Or maybe Rubick is the jealous one. He does steal everyone else’s abilites, after all.
One of the later additions to the original Dota, Rubick sees a lot of play in competitive matches thanks to a wide range of abilities, with a stun, a disable, a debuff and a buff aura all making him one of the stronger and more versatile supports in the game. But what makes him so popular, and so often banned, is that he can steal spells with his ultimate, appropriately named Spell Steal.
This was somewhat balanced in the original Dota thanks to the limitations of the WC3 engine, which rendered a lot of his opponent’s abilities unstealable, just because having two of them on the field just wasn’t possible when played on the aging code. But in Source this isn’t a problem, and pretty much everything is fair game. Which, as you might imagine, makes him feel a bit broken at the moment.
Add to that the fact that he can currently steal spells from allies, as well as buff any ability that has a Scepter upgrade if he’s got Aghanim’s in his inventory, and he’s getting pretty ludicrous. Slap a Refresher Orb on him and Tidehunter and there’s no reason you can’t have quadruple Ravage going on, or a triple Infest with Lifestealer. Throw the two of them in Spiritbreaker and you’ve got yourself a global 1200 damage AoE. Nasty.
It’s important to note that this is just on the test server at the moment, which means that, come Friday, most of that is likely to be taken out, with an updated version of the hero making it into the official release. The one thing that is likely to carry over, however, is that now Rubick mimicks the casting animation of whoever he’s stolen from, meaning you won’t have any more instacast Fissures. Swings and roundabouts. He gets a buff from stealing more spells, but takes longer to cast them.
Likely in preparation for the second International, Rubick is one of the more entertaining competitive heroes, because of all the crazy combinations that he can pull off with his Spell Steal, along with the hilarity of Telekenisis, which lets him pick up and throw enemy heroes, much in the way of Tiny’s Toss, only here he gets to stun everyone around the landing point.
If you want to give him a whirl right now he’s available to play on the test server, but bear in mind this seems to be a very WIP build of the hero, and not all that representative of the version we’ll find added to the game on Friday. Either way, it’s going to be a fun time.