Rogue Subclass Tier Ranking (Part 3) In Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the seekers guide to twisted taverns which is just coming off the back of a wildly successful kickstarter campaign and is now available for pre-order this book contains 14 brand new taverns for you to explore and join in the revelry with your party at your own game table they absolutely blew through all of their amazing stretch goals and there are tons of super fun accessories as well to augment your game taverns have been a cornerstone of dungeons and dragons campaign and i feel like we're overdue for a good pub crawl some of our amazing friends are working on this project including logan from runesmith here on youtube as well as elder mancy and ghostfire games so make sure to check out the links below to pre-order your copy of twisted taverns and get the party started and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode this is part three of our subclass tier rankings for the rogue in dungeons and dragons fifth edition and in this episode specifically we're going to be looking at the two new subclasses that were introduced for rogues in tasha's cauldron of everything the phantom and the soul knife if you look on the screen right now you're going to see the criteria that we use to rank the subclasses we are pitting the subclasses against each other and not those of other classes also keep in mind that although we may touch on roleplay potential and multi-classing these are not core elements of our ranking when we rank the subclasses we consider all elements of dungeons and dragons play not just combat well that is often an important part of our rankings we do want to consider how the subclass augments the base class in exploration scenarios problem solving interactions and all the other diverse adventuring situations that characters can encounter in games of dungeons and dragons so while their combat efficacy is something that we consider and for many rogue subclasses they the the features are often quite combat oriented we do want to take a special note when there are non-combat related features to these subclasses because they can add a lot to playing the character there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling the first of the two subclasses introduced in tasha's is the phantom this is a rogue with a bit of a connection to a past life or undead creatures or the spirits of the dead they gain abilities that kind of connect them with a little bit of a necromantic or sort of haunted flair which is a very unique flavor for a rogue definitely overall the flavor and lore of this subclass feels a little bit more on the magical side of the roguish nature there's a real story implied here let's see how those features work out though at third level you gain whispers of the dead in with this ability a little ghost helps you out with your proficiencies and every time you take a short or long rest you can choose a skill or tool proficiency that you are not proficient with and gain proficiency with it that proficiency lasts until you change it out essentially you get one extra skill or tool proficiency that you can swap out each time you finish a rest by just calling up one of your spectral buddies and getting them to give you some advice also a third level you gain whales from the grave when you attack a creature using your sneak attack rogue feature uh you can choose another target within 30 feet of them and deal half the amount of sneak attack dice rounded up to that creature as necrotic damage you can only use whispers of the grave a number of times per day equal to your proficiency modifier there is no attack roll or a saving throw for this damage the target simply takes it it does have to be a target though other than the one that you hit with your sneak attack so if you are facing a single enemy you won't have a target a ninth level you gain trinkets of the departed when a creature that you can see dies within 30 feet of you you can summon their soul into a tiny trinket this doesn't cost any sort of action but you do need a free hand in order to obtain the trinket you can never have more soul trinkets than your proficiency bonus so if you have a proficiency bonus of plus four and are carrying four soul trinkets you can't make any more but as long as you have at least one soul trinket you have advantage on death saving throws and constitution saving throws so in addition to gaining this passive benefit well you have a soul trinket you can also expend soul trinkets in two ways the first is that you can use a soul trinket to gain an additional use of your whispers of the grave ability so as long as you're killing you can keep killing more um which is which seems to me to be the the number one way i would probably use this absolutely um but you could also use the soul trinkets to sort of ask a question of the dearly departed that is held within you get to ask them one question which they don't have to answer truthfully and they answer in the most concise fashion because they want to be free and get out of there so i do find it it's it's a way that you can kind of shoot first and ask questions later but it does have a very narrow use in the respect that you know you just murdered them yeah there's no reason why somebody you just stabbed in the back is going to be like oh let me help you so i feel like you're going to get dishonest answers more often than not yeah and and because you have to have been there and seen the person die in order to get their soul trinkets so again it's it it's not like you can just use this ability on a corpse that you found in the dungeon to figure out hey what killed you no you know how they died you were there the way i see it is this ability is for very niche circumstances it's a cool feature to use but mostly you're going to be using it to do the whispers of the grave i guess if you're stuck in a dungeon and you're like how do i get out of here maybe they'll be like well there's a secret passage over there since i'm dead i don't care leave but it's up to the dm to determine what that's going to look like one thing this ability isn't clear about are you actually trapping the soul of the person that you killed i assumed so because these soul trinkets last indefinitely so in theory you could kill the big bad evil guy trap their soul in a soul trinket and just keep that soul trinket in your safe deposit box for a rainy day yeah so the the wording isn't clear here on whether or not you are actually trapping the soul of the person that you kill because if you are that is potentially useful in certain situations i could see some liches in the world paying high prices for high level souls and uh you could start your own market your own your own black market selling souls so there's there's some neat implications with this idea at 13th level you gain ghost walk you can take on a ghostly form and now you can walk through objects and creatures if you end your turn within an object or creature you do take damage but you also gain a flying speed of 10 feet so you can kind of float around like a ghost most notably though while you're in this form attack rules against you have disadvantage so as long as you keep murdering people you will have a good stockpile of flying speed incorporeal movement and a pretty good defensive benefit for a rogue attack rolls against you having disadvantage is like wearing a cloak of displacement all the time so not a bad defensive feature actually at level 17 you gain death's friend this ability just amplifies some of your earlier abilities in some pretty key ways when you use whales of the grave the additional damage that you did to the second target also applies to the first target as well so now you're getting a 50 increase in your sneak attacks the secondary option is that if you have no soul trinkets on you at the end of a long rest you immediately gain one both of these are pretty useful and at 17th level this really kind of dials up some of your abilities a little better so i'll start off by saying i like the phantom i think it's pretty nifty and i like the lore behind it it's unlike the best rogue subclasses though like the arcane trickster and the swashbuckler who get their best abilities right away at level three i feel like this subclass cut doesn't come into its own until level 13 when it gets ghost walk and it really gets sweet at level 17 when it's increasing your sneak attack damage by a lot more um the ability to have your sneak attack kind of stab two people at once is cute but not necessarily amazing right like it's it is extra damage i'm not gonna knock it but a lot of the time when we're looking at damage dealing abilities we're looking for abilities that add more damage to the target that you wanted dead now they don't instead of spreading to another one so that that's kind of where this ability loses it because again if you're in a boss battle against one monster you don't have any use for this ability until level 17. exactly right um the ghost walk is an amazing defensive power and i think getting the advantage on constitution saving throws while you have a soul trinket and the ability to um this the other thing too is the whispers from the grave ability is limited use it's limited to the number of times per day you can use it on your proficiency so you have to keep killing to keep using it if it was just always on and you didn't have to expend soul trinkets i feel like i feel like the subclass you should have got the soul trinkets at level three and there should be like two or three more things that we should be able to do with the soul trinkets i know for for me i i think i think at higher levels like at level 13 this becomes maybe an a because the ghost walk is that strong and the extra damage on sneak attack is really good but i think until then it's a b ah that's that's a tough sell um i want to give this subclass an a okay why um so first of all i know that you're saying you know you want to kill the one thing dead now and yes that applies to boss battles but boss battles make up two percent of the battles we're engaging with in dungeons and dragons so being able to do half your sneak attack damage against a secondary target i can see so many times that that is valuable there are times that i'm hitting a target but my friend is also being hit by somebody to be able to damage that a little bit so that on their turn they can finish it off can actually change the flow of a battle i i do find that ability really useful do i think this is the best subclass for rogues no i don't think it's as good as the swashbuckler i don't think it's as good as the arcane trickster but i do think it's pretty sweet i mean the arcane trickster could take green flame blade and have a pretty similar thing in their cantrips okay but it's only five feet but but but again and and you're probably gonna want to take booming blade and whatnot so like you know i think for me it's not like the other rogue like the other rogue subclasses that are top top tier for us they have a lot of ways to improve their sneak attacks or get better damage so it's not like this is the only option in the field for getting extra damage on your sneak attack yeah so we are comparing all the roads together the question is i guess this is definitely a good one but like if we look at the arcane trickster who's using booming blade and has a familiar to grant them advantage and has all their tricks or if we look at the swashbuckler who is given so many more guarantees that they're gonna get their sneak attack i think this one comes up a little short by comparison we gave the scout an a does the phantom feel like it performs as well as the scout obviously different there's very different vibes going on here i i might also be leaning into the the lore and vibe of the phantom which i love does it match the scout or do you think it doesn't quite perform as well as the scout uh the scout's another one where the high level ability gets really strong two and we are taking it all in to account as one package i i'm on the fence you you have some good points but i think saying that at higher levels it hits its stride we are looking at it as a complete package yeah it's hard because most campaigns don't reach those levels exactly but we do need to look at this as a complete rogue level 1 to 20. i think with the phantom you're going to spend 12 levels definitely as a b by comparison i i think that the the scout certainly i think the scout at lower levels it's another one that has amazing features that come online pretty early yeah right so i i think that the fact that you have to wait until level 13 to get your ghost walk and and even the soul trinkets thing you have to wait till level nine to get that that's one of the coolest abilities of the subclass but you have to wait a long time for the for the most part for for nine levels of play the subclass is you get an extra proficiency in one skill that you can swap out and you get to deal fifty percent of your sneak attack damage to somebody else that that is not a lot comp especially like when you compare to the other other classes it's not a lot to get at level three all right here's here's the deal i'm willing to give this a b and i'll make this statement again about what b means b means that the subclass has the potential to excel in the right campaign or the right setting and the right campaign for the phantom rogue is a high level campaign if you are playing a high level one shot the phantom rogue might be an a or s tier which is what the b is is is it in the right campaign in the right setting and can it excel in that in that setting i'm willing to give it a b under that stipulation that that this is a good solid b level subclass which means that played by the right people in the right campaigns it's going to be great i really agree with that and i especially think that it its stock rises uh in any situation where you need to trap a soul so rogues are known for having slippery minds but some rogues take that to the next level and i think the soul knife with their psionic mind is a really cool twist the soul knife is a classic archetype as well the idea of conjuring mind blades is a really fun one and so i think that this subclass is super exciting because yeah if you want to stab people with your brain you can place one life yeah so a third level you're going to gain psionic power if you've looked over the psi warrior this works very much the same you get a pool of d6 is equal to twice your proficiency bonus which are your psionic energy dice you can expend them on various abilities and you get them back on a long rest but also during a short rest you can gain one use of them back so you do have quite a few uses and it does level up with you the die size grows at fifth 11th and 17th level eventually going from a d6 to a d8 to a d10 to a d12 they empower a whole bunch of your other abilities sci empowered knack allows you to roll a cyanic energy die and add that to a failed skill check as long as you're proficient with that skill or tool possibly turning the fail into a success what's really cool about this ability is that the die is only expended if you succeed so if you fail an ability check and you're like did i fail it by two or three or five i don't know there's no risk to you you to you not using this ability you always get to roll the die take the gamble that you're going to turn a failure into a success and if you succeed you expend the die the second ability is psionic whispers you can now create a telepathic bond between you and your allies the amount of creatures you can target are equal to your proficiency bonus but you can have two-way telepathic communication for upwards to one mile a length of time that you determine by rolling your psionic energy die which it really even one hour is going to be useful enough impactful the important thing to note here is that a lot of telepathic communication is one way which makes communicating kind of difficult the person who has the telepathy can say hey you head over there but the person can't respond back with this ability it's open communication so your entire party can be communicating non-verbally which is incredibly useful for infiltration tactics being a rogue and having this option means that you get to say hey guys we're doing an infiltration mission and turn on that non-verbal communication but the thing that we're all really here for also gained at third level you get to conjure psychic blades from your mind your psychic blades deal psychic damage and they have the finesse and throne properties what's really cool about the psychic blades is when you conjure the first one you can conjure a second one as a bonus action and also stab somebody with it or throw it so the second blade only does d4 for energy but you get dual wielding basically baked in if you throw the blades they vanish and you don't have to expend your sonic energy die to conjure these blades up you're always armed you just mind blade stab somebody and it disappears and it doesn't even actually leave physical wounds on the target either the only thing that we have encountered with this is that we did encounter one of the rare instances where we played a soul knife where we had an enemy that was immune to psychic damage it's very rare there's not many enemies that are immune to it because what's cool about this is that these blades are magical right so and they deal psychic damage which is very rarely resisted but you're still going to want to carry a backup weapon as a soul knife for the very rare times when you do fight a mind player that's immune to psychic damage what i love about this ability is that it also broadcasts another one of my favorite rogue archetypes and that is the idea of the infiltrator rogue who goes into like a banquet or a party without any weapons on them yeah the rogue who can summon their own weapons from their mind is really fun to play around with the implications of disguising yourself and being like i have no weapons on me at all and then bam bam you have two blades it kind of feels a little bit like loki with his knife yeah which i love i love this at ninth level you're going to gain soul blades now you can use psionic energy dice to empower your psychic blades and make them even more potent in battle this comes with two different options that you can use the first one is homing strike when you make an attack and miss you can roll a psychic energy dice and add that to the roll to turn it into a hit same as with previous options that we looked at if you still miss you do not expend the die the next option is psychic teleportation as a bonus action you can throw your blade a number of feet equal to 10 times the number rolled on the psychic energy die and you immediately teleport to the unoccupied space that you threw your blade i've seen this in use and it is really handy at 13th w you gain psychic veil as an action you can become invisible for one hour the invisibility ends early if you damage a creature or if you force them to make a saving throw so what's interesting about this is that you can actually still attack it's just if you damage somebody that you become visible which is kind of neat compared to regular regular invisibility spells you can use this feature once per day or you can use it again by expending a psionic energy die so so far we're an invisible teleporting rogue that conjures psychic blades what are we going to get level 17. so at 17th level we gain rend mind when you use a psychic blade and deliver your sneak attack damage you can cause the creature to make a wisdom saving throw if they fail the saving throw they are now stunned the stun lasts for one minute but the creature does get to repeat the saving throw to shake it off you can use this feature once and then afterwards you have to spend cyanic energy dice to use it more than once per day so we have a telepathic blade conjuring bonus to hit and skill checks getting teleporting invisible rogue that stuns people yeah there's only one other thing i would want on my rogue and that's something like disguise self but luckily there are many feats i can choose from to really complete this package i am gonna break one of our rules here and i just feel like i have to do this we don't compare the subclasses to other classes but i do think that there's a very important comparison to be made between this and the psy warrior the psy warrior we had some issues with the fact that the ways that you could use your psionic energy dice were a little lackluster they didn't feel very potent or powerful they were cool and we liked them for the most part but we thought that there should be more and we thought that they should be more potent i want to make that comparison because i think the soul knifes ways that they can use the psionic energy die are incredible they are so key for a rogue to be able to do these things turning turning misses into hits or missed skill checks into successes and if you don't succeed you don't use your psionic energy dice that's off the chain good the multiple ways of communicating non-verbally combined with the ability to turn invisible and the ability to throw your knife and teleport these these are iconic for a rogue what this subclass feels like it's doing is it's it's saying hey what do you wish you could do as a rogue here you go yep and i think just for that reason like this feels like an s to your rogue to me i i want to give this the s tier there is nothing missing from this package in my opinion and the only things that i might want i would pick up uh fey touched shadow touched or a magic initiate to add in a few extra elements to really complete this package and i can do that pretty easily i will say an arcane trickster can have shadow blade an arcane trickster can have invisibility an arcane trickster can have misty step an arcane trickster does have a familiar to help them with accuracy and skill checks and all these other things but this is very focused and very thematic i don't know if it is better than the arcane trickster but it definitely comes close especially if you do take the feats to pill for some spells and re-flavor them as more psychic powers i think this is the nest here i'm glad we're in agreeance because i was ready to fight you yeah i i i wasn't sure but i think when we do the math on this you're getting a lot i don't think it's i think the arcane trickster is still potentially better the arcane trickster is going to be teleporting earlier but not as often they're going to be turning invisible earlier but not as often the arcane trickster might do a bit more damage because they can do like the shenanigans with booming blade and stuff like that but this is really good i see no reason not to give this a nest here we also gave swashbuckler a nest here and i will say again i'm having such a blast playing a swashbuckler the abilities are really potent i think if i had started a rogue after tash's had come out i might have gone with soul knife that would have been an extremely different character from the one i'm playing uh because the vibe wouldn't have matched but the soul knife is one of my favorite rogue subclasses that i've ever seen and i think not only is the theme really cool and makes me want to play it but what i'm always looking for in my subclasses is do the abilities and the potency of those abilities match the theme and in this case they do i really feel like i get to play that psychic blade wielding rogue and i have so many cool ideas for how i could bring this to life and it's all there it's all baked into the class yeah i think all the abilities feel appropriate for when they come online i think that they really get you get to use them a lot and they always will have an impact like i i gotta say that the mechanic of of having to only expend the die when you succeeded is great like it makes you feel like you didn't waste the power so up on screen right now you're going to see our final rankings for the rogue subclasses in dungeons and dragons 5th edition let's take a look at what our community thought of these two so we asked our community to tell us how they ranked the subclasses and six thousand people responded of those six thousand seventeen point two percent gave the phantom an s-tier ranking with 41.6 percent giving it an a and 34 giving it a b 6.5 giving it ac and just a sliver like less than 30 people overall gave it a d tier ranking so quite uh profoundly i think most of our community thinks that the fandom is worthy of that a ranking and i do wonder if folks that gave that ranking or higher were you really excited about the high level abilities um because i feel like the low level ones aren't quite as good so i do agree that if we look at the whole package it is an a but i can't help but feel that for about half the gameplay it's gonna feel a little bit on the weaker side of things let me know about that in the comments as we move on to the soul knife we're looking at a 26.7 percent for s-tier 44.2 for a tier 23.5 for b tier and 4.7 for c tier with very few people giving this the d tier ranking what's really interesting is that this also lands conclusively in the a tier but i'm starting to notice a pattern with monty and i that we might be notorious for doing this in these rankings and that is that the phantom is conclusively an a tier but obviously leans closer to the b tier in its ranking whereas the soul knife is an a tier that leans more heavily to the s tier so i feel like monty and i just like to nudge things in a direction where you know it it stands for reason that there are a lot of people who thought the soul knife was the stronger of these two subclasses and the phantom was the slightly weaker but both have proven to be well liked by the community and in my opinion well liked by both of us as well these are great subclasses for the rogue yeah i definitely do feel that um there's a little bit of a polarizing upper echelon of the rogues like the swashbuckler the arcane trickster and the soul knife who really feel like they are cut above the riffraff of the other rogues out there uh in fantasyland these these three subclasses are really strong and i would look forward to playing any of them i think for me personally if i was playing a rogue the the ones that we the scout i would be quite tempted by but i i think that these three i feel like with the lower ranked rogues it almost feels like you don't get that much whereas the other the stronger upper tier rogue subclasses they just feel like they get so many more powers and abilities i i agree with that and i do think that uh you know it could be said that when monty and i like a rogue we really like a rogue and if we're indifferent about a rogue it falls much further down but i i do agree that i feel like between the swashbuckler the soul knife and the arcane trickster you get three really iconic archetypes for rogues and something that i'm always looking for is does the fantasy that's being displayed here come to life in the gameplay elements and i feel like these three that we've given the s tier two really bring the fantasy of these uh of these iconic rogues to life in profound ways that you will feel at the table when you're playing them i agree and i feel like the other rogue subclasses don't quite nail the fantasy that they're going after quite as well like they we don't see that really nice combo of flavor and efficacy that we do in the high tier sunglasses an arcane trickster feels like an arcane trickster a swashbuckler feels like a swashbuckler and a soul knife feels like a soul knife whereas i feel like the um the assassin as long as you're getting surprised does but as soon as you're not getting surprised you're like what am i doing yeah and i i i just feel like we we could take a second look at some of those lower subclasses and really see if there was a way to bring that fantasy to life in as powerful of a way as the soul knife swashbuckler and arcane trickster as for these two subclasses even the phantom i think really does feel like it is delivering on that fantasy it just doesn't feel as potent so i do want to give some credit to the phantom that and the scout uh the phantom is riding that line between b and a and i also want to say that the community giving this an a i will say the phantom does feel like it is filling out that theme yeah it does have a theme to deliver it delivers it well enough maybe not as powerful as the three that we gave vest here to both these subclasses are profound additions to an already great class and i think anybody who's setting out to play a rogue is going to have a great time no matter which subclass you play so with that in mind if you look on screen right now you're going to see our final rankings for all of the rogue subclasses and next to that you're going to see all of the community rankings for the rogue subclasses we really like a lot of the rogue subclasses and you might notice there's a bit of a gap in the eights here and again i feel like the ones that we like we just really like and there's a lot of great play to be had with rogues they're an iconic part of dungeons and dragons and will continue to be so for years to come so this has been part three of our tier rankings for the rogue subclasses in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about what you think of these two subclasses in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6 pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more guides for players and dungeon masters right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 271,701

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: Rzj0UGYW3wA

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021