hmm I understood that support characters taking last hits away from carries is not wise, didn't realise it extended to sacrificing exp as well as gold. So the Rubick was essentially a glorified scout?
Rubick, even without farm or levels, can single handedly turn the tide of a fight. He's one of the highest impact support in the game, and that is why he's one of the most picked support in any setup. He also fits any setup against any setup, he does everything. Another very high impact hero is Shadow Demon, because Disruption can save your carry if he gets caught in a shitty spot at the start of a fight and that's basically the most valuable of skills.
In pro games, farm is concentrated on certain heroes, however it's not uncommon for the supports to get small windows of time where the big carries leave the lane so the supports can catch up on levels for a few minutes and reach lvl 6-8, but at that point their goal is to protect the carries, ward the map, always be there for a fight, sacrifice themselves to save the others and stuff like that, so yeah it can be rough. They will sometimes catch up just from teamfights/ganks if the game is going well however, as you gain a lot of xp and pretty good gold from assists.
In pubs, this won't be as bad most of the time. While you shouldn't actively try to steal last hits during laning and concentrate on stacking, pulling, checking runes, warding, and not leech too much xp and gold from your carries, there is usually a lot more time to catch up in pubs so even as a pure support player I often end up at lvl 14-16 with one or two items, while pro supports wouldn't get half that.
As for Rubick spellsteal, works on any spells regardless, he always steals the version the enemy used. For example stealing an ult from someone with an aghanim will let you cast the aghanim version even if you don't have one. There's also interesting cases where for example stealing Luna's Eclipse will cast Eclipse with Luna's Beam rank instead of your own Beam ranks, which would do no damage. The increased rank on Spell Steal only reduce the cooldown and increase the amount of time you keep the spells. I often skip the lvl 11 ult in favor of finishing the aura if I put more points than 1 in stun, as it's not as gamechanging most of the time. Definitely worth taking after that however(which in most cases is lvl 12 since I rarely put more than 2points in stun until 13-14).
