Not sure what you mean by any methods that won't "render the device useless" because rooting your phone isn't supposed to or known to do that and you can only run into problems if you're flashing a ROM or kernel and mess up somewhere during the process but even then problems are usually fixable. Assuming you're looking for an easy one click method such as Kingo or Towelroot unfortunately there are none for the Note 5. You can however flash your kernel which will require a custom recovery which you can get through Odin which is a PC program. For an in depth step by step tutorial I suggest you go to the xda-developers forums.
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