DotA101: Hero Guide to Rikimaru the Stealth Assasin

Riki is a melee carry agility hero that specializes in scouting enemies due to its permanent invisibility skill. He is best useful in late games due to his massive physical damage to enemy heroes. But remember, his greatest strength can also be his greatest weakness. 

Rikimaru in Dota2 fanart

As starting items you can have a series of choices. One is having a Quelling Blade to have an easy creepkill, Stout Shield for protective uses and Tango for regeneration purposes or you can have Ring of Protection, Quelling blade, Tango and Healing Salve and then two Ironwood Braches. Another option is having two Slippers of Agility for more agility stats in the lane, two Ironwood Branches and then Tango and Healing Salve. I guess that's all you need to survive and to be successful in your lane.

For your laning items, you might have a Poorman's Shield as damage blocker, Magicwand for survival purposes, Power Treads or Tranquil boots, and some stats  addition items like Wraithband for instance. I dont recommend Phaseboots for Riki because his got a passive ability which is his ultimate, the Permanent Invisibility, activating such item would diffuse his ulti.

Riki in the bottom lane

As core items or mid game items, i extremely recommend Cranium Basher, Masko of Madness for attack speed increase and Diffusal Blade. Even though Diffusal Blade's mana burn wont stack, I still recommend to have that because what's important is its purge effect which slows enemy and therefore giving them a hard time escaping the Smokescreen, the first ability of Riki. While Mask of Madness is of very mush use for having fast attack speed and therefore gives Riki a lot of advantage in dealing massive physical damage. But be wise in using this item because it gives you additional 30% damage taken from enemies attacking you. And because of that I require you to have Blackingbar to prevent magic attack in damaging you, since Riki has a small hp pool.

Rikimaru in full item build

And finally for his luxury and late game items, I'd like you to upgrade your Cranium Basher to Abyssal Blade for more disable to the enemy.You can also have Monkeyking Bar as a replacement to Diffusal Blade if you like to give enemies a painful bonus 100 true damage. While you can change the Mask of Madness to Butterfly as his supreme item in the late game for increasing his attack speed. You may also upgrade your Diffusal Blade to its level 2 state for more slow charges to the enemy. And finally you can add Manta Style or SangeYasha as your final item to your hero.

Riki in Dota2

Everyone, I guess this is my own hero guide to one of my favorite hero. I hope you can take some good suggestions from this blog. But you also experiment on your hero to try what items could help them in helping your teamates to the highest extent.