Phantom Rogue Rework

[sayaijin]

I really like the theme and flavor of the recent UA phantom rogue, but I think they pushed the main class feature out too far. Here is my rework:

Phantom Rogue:

Tokens of the Departed
3rd-level Phantom feature

When a life ends in your presence, you’re able to
snatch a token from the departing soul, a sliver
of its life essence that takes physical form. As a
reaction when a creature you can see dies within
30 feet of you, you open your free hand and a
Tiny trinket appears there, a soul trinket. The
DM chooses the trinket’s form or has you roll on
the Trinkets table in the Player’s Handbook to
determine it.
While the soul trinket is on your person, you
have advantage on death saving throws and
Constitution saving throws, as your vitality is
enhanced by the life essence within the object.
You can have a maximum number of soul
trinkets equal to your proficiency bonus, and you
can’t create one while at your maximum.
You can destroy a trinket to gain a skill or tool proficiency that lasts until it is replaced using this feature.

Specter's Blade
3rd-level Phantom feature

You have learned to channel the power of the soul trinkets into a spectral assault. Immediately after you deal your sneak attack damage, you can target a second creature you can see within 30 ft of the first creature. If you destroy a trinket, a phantom duplicate of you attacks the original or the second creature with advantage. On a hit, it deals psychic damage equal to half your sneak attack dice for your level rounded up. Immediately after the attack, the duplicate vanishes.

Taxing Death
9th-level Phantom feature

You have learned to further extract the power of every soul fragment you claim. As a bonus action, you may destroy a trinket to use one of the following effects:
Borrow Experience: Gain advantage on your next attack roll, saving throw, or ability check.
Eyes of the Dead: Name a place the soul has seen in life and if it's the same plane of existence, you receive visual and auditory information as if you were in its space using its senses while concentrating up to ten minutes. A creature with true sight or see invisibility sees a ghostly image of the soul for the duration.
Steal life: gain 2d8 health.
Query Soul: You ask a question of the soul that it must answer truthfully to the best of its knowledge while living. You don't need to share a language for the creature's soul to communicate.


Ghost Walk
13th-level Phantom feature

You can now phase partially into the realm of the
dead, becoming like a ghost. As a bonus action, you can destroy a trinket to assume a spectral form for 10 minutes. You gain a flying speed of 10 ft in addition to your normal walking speed, you can hover, and attack rolls against you have disadvantage. You can also move through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain, but you take 1d10 force damage if you end your turn inside an object. If you end your turn inside a creature, both you and the creature take 1d10 force damage.

Death Knell
17th-level Phantom feature

When you use your Specter's Blade ability, a second duplicate appears and can attack the first, second, or a third targeted creature.

[JNAProductions]

Tokens of the Departed is two free skill proficiencies and advantage on Death and Con saving throws. Especially since you can literally just kill three chickens to gain the benefits. The skills are maybe okay (though letting them be floating is pretty good) the save advantages, not so much.

Specter's Blade gives a use for the trinkets, but it's not worth getting rid of your last one pretty much ever.

Taxing Death fails the Bag of Rats test hard.

Ghost Walk is too good. Kill anything for 10 minutes of incorporeality?

Death Knell feels a little too powerful, but not that bad.

Overall, the issue is it seems you wanted to limit the features based on being able to kill stuff... But you lack any wording that stops you from swatting a mosquito, or cooking a chicken, or anything else like that.

[sayaijin]

Tokens of the Departed is two free skill proficiencies and advantage on Death and Con saving throws. Especially since you can literally just kill three chickens to gain the benefits. The skills are maybe okay (though letting them be floating is pretty good) the save advantages, not so much.

Specter's Blade gives a use for the trinkets, but it's not worth getting rid of your last one pretty much ever.

Taxing Death fails the Bag of Rats test hard.

Ghost Walk is too good. Kill anything for 10 minutes of incorporeality?

Death Knell feels a little too powerful, but not that bad.

Overall, the issue is it seems you wanted to limit the features based on being able to kill stuff... But you lack any wording that stops you from swatting a mosquito, or cooking a chicken, or anything else like that.

So tokens should only be one floating proficiency. I apologise if it's worded as if you get two. You're absolutely right about wanting to conserve that last trinket to keep advantage though. Until level 5, you can only use this feature once in a battle before you have to give up those save advantages. That's even if you kill a chicken beforehand. Then you have to have someone die during the fight to use it again.

The only aspect of taxing death that I thought may be OP is the healing. I personally like the idea of asking a question of a rat or scrying on a location that a rat saw while it was alive - maybe it's been in the dungeon you want to break out of?

Ghost walk may be too good, but that one was actually nerfed slightly from the UA. In the UA, you got one free use before using tokens.

Death knell is comparable to other rogue features that allow them to deal double SA damage.

What do you think if I take away the Con advantage from the trinket (just death save), and I remove healing from Taxing death?