Soulknife Rogue: D&D 2024 (5.5e) Optimisation Guide

Psychic blades and psionics make for a particularly stealthy rogue subclass that can stun their enemies and turn invisible.

At a glance

What’s changed in D&D 2024?

Not too much really. Mostly, the changes that come into play are to bring the subclass in line with new rules and options in D&D 2024 which includes:

• Weapon mastery for psychic blades: These now get their own weapon mastery property in vex to bring them in line with other weapons and ensure you aren’t placed at a disadvantage for using them.
• Extended throw range: Psychic blades also get a thrown range of 120ft instead of the previous 60ft.

Soulknife features

Psionic power – Lv3

How it works

You have psionic energy dice that fuel your psionic powers. You start with 4 of these and the number grows as you gain levels (up to 12). The size of the dice also grows with your level, starting at d6 and eventually becoming d12.

You start with 2 psionic energy-fuelled abilities:

• Psi-bolstered knack: You can enhance a skill check you’re proficient in if you fail the check. Just use a psionic energy die and add the roll to the check. The die is only expended if you succeed the check.
• Psychic whispers: You can speak telepathically with multiple creatures for a number of hours determined by your psionic energy die. You get one free use per day and can get repeat uses of this ability by expending a psionic energy die.

Tactics

• Because psi-bolstered knack only expends a psionic energy die if you succeed, it can be worth using even when the odds of success seem unlikely. You may not always want to use it for unimportant skill checks as you have a limited number of psionic energy dice to use.
• It can also be worth enhancing the number of skill proficiencies you have so you have more opportunities to use this rather than just filling in skill gaps in the party. For this reason, it can be worth not only making your rogue the stealth master of the group, but also the face of the group as well. Perhaps by using feats to supplement your skills.
• Telepathy is really useful for stealth moments and a free use a day should be all you need most days. So until you get more ways to use your psionic energy dice, you can feel free to spend them on enhancing skills.

Psychic blades – Lv3

How it works

You can make psychic blades manifest in your hands when you attack. They deal 1d6 psychic damage (or 1d4 when used with your offhand attack), are finesse weapons that can be thrown and have the vex weapon mastery.

Tactics

• Psychic damage isn’t resisted all that often so a good damage type to wield.
• Vex will help you land your sneak attack by granting advantage on attacks.
• Using your offhand attack as a bonus action will increase your chances of landing a sneak attack. You can decide on this once your first attack has landed and determine if you’d rather do something else with your bonus action.
• The handy thing with these blades is they’re thrown and have a better range than any other thrown weapon. You can also throw them with your offhand attack too. This means that you often don’t need to get close to the danger to maintain your effectiveness at landing sneak attacks. Just ensure you have advantage by using vex, hide and steady aim.
• With dual-wielding so useful for a soulknife, it could be tempting to multiclass into a fighter (or some other class with a fighting style feat) and take two-weapon fighting for the improved offhand attack but this isn’t necessary as your sneak attack damage is the important part of having an offhand attack available.

Soul blades – Lv9

How it works

You have 2 more ways to use your psionic energy dice:

• Homing strikes: If you miss an attack, you can roll a psionic energy die and add the value to your attack roll. That die is only expended if your attack becomes a hit.
• Psychic teleportation: You can throw a psychic blade as a bonus action and teleport to the spot it lands in. This distance is 10 times a roll of your psionic energy die (which is expended when you use this ability).

Tactics

• You now have a misty step-like ability which is great for accessing awkward places or escaping combat and grapples.
• Homing strikes makes you one of the most reliable sources of sneak attacks which is hugely valuable for a rogue. Plus it stacks with things like advantage.

Psychic veil – Lv13

How it works

You can turn invisible for an hour using a magic action. You can do this once per day or expend a psionic energy die to do it more often.

Tactics

• Great for sneaking into combat to land a stealthy first attack and surprise your enemies.
• Also great for escaping combat when things get desperate. But mostly during combat, you don’t want to be expending actions for the advantages of invisibility as they require an action and you can just hide for this with a bonus action (albeit for a lesser effect).
• Perhaps the best use case for this is for stealthing around as you can make it last the full hour and remain relatively unnoticed.

Rend mind – Lv17

How it works

When you land a sneak attack with your psychic blades, you can force the target to take a wisdom saving throw or be stunned for a minute (repeating the save each turn).

You can do this once per day for free and use a psionic energy die for any additional uses.

Tactics

• The ability to stun opponents is hugely powerful, especially on such a strong attack. This is the best use of your psionic energy dice in combat and you should ensure you have uses available for exactly this. This shouldn’t be too hard as you’ll have plenty available at this level.
• You can stun dangerous enemies then move onto the next enemy the next turn, effectively keeping multiple enemies out of combat.
• Because this isn’t a concentration spell, you can affect multiple enemies simultaneously in this way making it better than a spell. Plus, you can do this at range by throwing your psychic blades.

How good is the soulknife?

The soulknife has loads of utility. Need to teleport? They can do that. What about telepathy? They can do that too. How about telepathic communication? Well you get my drift. They have loads of tools that just make them better at being a good rogue. On top of all this, they also happen to be incredibly reliable when it comes to making skill checks. Long range thrown weapons, bonus action attacks if needed and more reliable attacks also make sneak attacks more likely.

All of this together just makes them extremely good at being a rogue and a really strong candidate for your rogue build.

5/5

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Building a soulknife

Soulknifes fit the needs of typical rogues despite their psionic features. Stealth and high damage attacks are the main things to focus on with this build.

Below I’ve put together how you can build an optimal soulknife.

Ability scores

Recommended options

• Dexterity: Important for AC, attacks and stealth skills. A must have for any rogue.
• Constitution: You might be dodging in and out of danger, but you’ll still likely find yourself regularly getting a bruising. Especially if you plan on getting close to your targets. This is less important on the high range soulknife, but still very useful.
• Charisma: With all the subterfuge, you may find you need to be a dab-hand at deception or persuasion so a decent charisma won’t go amiss, especially if you want to use your more reliable skill checks on being the party face.

Options to avoid

• Wisdom: Only useful for skills and saving throws but you’ve got too much else to focus on anyway.
• Intelligence: Again, only useful for the odd skill and little else.
• Strength: Pointless on a rogue. You should dump this.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	8	8
Dexterity	15	15
Constitution	15	14
Intelligence	8	12
Wisdom	8	10
Charisma	15	13

Skills

Recommended options

• Acrobatics: Good for any physical activities and works with your dexterity, unlike athletics.
• Deception: Very important face skill for a rogue.
• Insight: Great face skill.
• Intimidation: Decent face skill if you want to lean into charisma.
• Investigation: Good option for discovering things.
• Perception: Always useful, especially for the guy at the front checking for traps.
• Persuasion: Top face skill. Essential if you intend to invest in face skills.
• Sleight of Hand: You’ll need this for unpicking locks and disarming traps.
• Stealth: Essential for a rogue as you’ll definitely need to sneak around places.

Options to avoid

• Athletics: You’re far better off going for acrobatics.

Species/race

There are a few things to consider when choosing a species for a soulknife:

• Safety first: Rogues are not as tough as other martials so anything that can help keep you safe is a good option. Resilience features can be useful too, but they tend to be secondary as you’re better off just avoiding damage altogether.
• Innate spellcasting: You can’t repeat cast spells and likely won’t be investing heavily in a spellcasting ability so often not the best option.

Recommended options

• Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness. For celestial revelation, all the options are useful but you usually want to avoid being surrounded by enemies, making flight your best option. Use this to throw psychic blades from the relative safety of the skies. And you can still hide in the air, popping out from behind trees, buildings and other things. It’s also useful outside of combat for accessing awkward places. A bit of healing is a decent emergency option too.
• Changeling (2024): Changelings are party face and subterfuge specialists. They’re really reliable charisma checks, and soulknifes enhance this further. On top of this, you can use shapeshifting to impersonate to mix up your stealth efforts.
• Halflings (2024): Much easier hiding is great for a rogue, allowing you to hide behind your wizard (or other ranged character of medium size) and jump out with sneak attacks. Luck is universally great, but especially good for a class with lots of high risk, high reward rolls like being stealthy, disarming traps, trying to deceive others and attempting to land sneak attacks. Brave gives you a little extra resilience which is always handy. The only problem is the lack of darkvision.
• Gnomes (2024): A Forest Gnome’s minor illusion and speak with animals actually work really well for a soulknife as they don’t require spell slots. Minor illusion is a cantrip that’s great for distractions and speak with animals can be cast as a ritual for information gathering. Gnomish cunning is an excellent durability feature against some very common saving throws.

Options to avoid

• Tiefling (2024): It’s hard to justify a cantrip attack over sneak attack with your psychic blades, especially when your dexterity will be superior to any spellcasting ability. The other spells can only be cast once, and with an inferior spellcasting ability.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

Primarily, you want to focus on increasing key ability scores (dexterity and constitution or charisma) with the associated origin feat being your next priority. As such, I’d suggest the below are your best backgrounds for a soulknife:

Name	Ability scores	Origin feat	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency
Criminal	Dexterity, constitution, intelligence	Alert	Sleight of hand, stealth	Thieves tools
Charlatan	Dexterity, constitution, charisma	Skilled	Deception, sleight of hand	Forgery kit
Entertainer	Strength, dexterity, charisma	Musician	Acrobatics, performance	One kind of musical instrument
Guide	Dexterity, constitution, wisdom	Magic initiate (druid)	stealth, survival	Cartographer’s tools
Wayfarer	Dexterity, wisdom, charisma	Lucky	Insight, stealth	Thieves’ tools

Criminal and charlatan probably have the best balance of ability score improvements, skills and origin feats. Charlatan works nicely if you want a broad spread of skill proficiencies to take advantage of psi-bolstered knack.

Feats

At 1st level, you can grab an origin feat through your background and from level 4, you can pick up a general feat (or another origin feat if you want) instead of an ability score increase.

Be aware that something like defensive duelist (which I’d normally recommend for a melee rogue) doesn’t work as your psychic blades disappear after you make an attack so you can’t parry with them. Piercer also doesn’t work due to the psychic damage of your blades (as opposed to piercing).

Below are some feats I’d recommend for a soulknife:

Origin feats

• Alert – You can either ensure you’re almost always one of the first to take a turn, or pass on to someone else. Going first is good for attacking from a hidden position and landing a sneak attack for a high damage (and potentially lethal) early attack.
• Lucky – More ways to be reliable at important rolls is universally beneficial. Especially for when you miss a sneak attack.
• Magic initiate – Rogues are a utility class and magic initiate can hand them some great utility spells like mage hand or minor illusion. While rogues don’t naturally invest highly in a spellcasting ability, they do have the space to do so. I’d suggest charisma for a soulknife to broaden your skill capabilities.
• Musician – A universally great feat for dishing out heroic inspiration. Great for altruistic rogues.

General feats

• Actor – Great if you want to impersonate others a lot and tackle some subterfuge. You’ll need some high charisma and face skill proficiencies to pull this off though. But psi-bolstered knack will help with this.
• Bloodlust – ABoH – Some decent mid-combat healing that doesn’t eat into your action economy plus better healing through your hit point dice. Your constitution should be decent anyway so the healing should be good and healing from an attack will be better than healing during a short rest, partly because the need for healing will be higher, but also because you get the constitution boost.
• Inspiring leader – Great for charisma-heavy soulknifes to grant temporary hit points to the party.
• Mage slayer – Best against mages, but having what is practically legendary resistance is also great.
• Skulker – Become really reliable at hiding. Blindsight is also great in certain situations that you could even exploit in combat through things like the darkness spell (if you work with an ally).
• Speedy – Good for hit and run tactics when you don’t want to use your bonus action on disengaging.
• Zhentarim tactics – HoF – Possibly one of the best and most reliable ways for a rogue to get more opportunity attacks which means potentially doubling your sneak attack output each round which can be substantial. It may mean less skulking than most rogues like to do though. Expertise in a changeable skill is really good for a skill heavy class. You may need a spare dagger to put in your hands after you attack with your psychic blades though so you can sneak attack with that.

Weapons

Unless you’re fighting something with psychic resistance, there’s no need for any weapons as your psychic blades work for melee and ranged attacks.

You could keep a dagger, shortsword and/or scimitar on you for those kinds of occasions and a light crossbow if you need some better range, but these are just contingencies really.

Armor

Your only real option here is studded leather as it’s so cheap that it’s easily available and you can only wear light armor. No other type of light armor is better than studded leather.

Other class guides

Not sure a soulknife is for you. Not to worry. Why not check out one of our other D&D 2024 class and subclass guides.