Hello adventurers of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the seventh episode of our feat series. Does your character have the passion, the desire, the drive nay are they destined to wield the crossbow have beauty forged both mechanical and crude elements fire and forth a bolt that lightning fast speeds but today find it kind of sucks yeah!
If they want to use it you know you got to grab this feat it makes it far better in so many ways i would make an argument that it actually makes it very useful. This is the crossbow expert feat dnd 5e and it is found in the players handbook. With that intro out of the way let’s take a quick look at the description so we know how does the crossbow expert feat work?
Description
Something i would like to point out there is no prerequisite for this. So anyone of any race, class or skill set (check out our skill checks) can grab it with no problems.
Thanks to the extensive practice with the crossbow you gain the following benefits. You ignore the loading property of the crossbows with which you are proficient. Being within 5 feet of a hostile creature doesn’t impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls. When you use the Attack action and attack with a one-handed weapon, you can use a bonus action to attack with a hand crossbow you are holding.
Really cool stuff! Really really cool stuff. Let’s take a look at the walkthrough so you can kind of break this down a little bit and just get a better grasp on it. Also read this dnd 5e crossbow bolts.
Walkthrough
So we’ll start with the first part the loading property: So in the good old players handbook, a loading is defined as the following, because of the time required to load this weapon you can only fire one piece of ammunition from it when you use an action, bonus action or reaction to fire from it. In this case you can’t fire twice with crossbow expert!
Regardless of the number of attacks you can only take, so in order to do ignore that so long as you’re proficient with it that means if you’re not proficient you don’t gain access to that full top portion there.
Now the second part being with five feet of a hostile creature doesn’t impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls. So that’s really cool, because it kind of implies that it is impossible to impose this advantage so long as that advantage is coming from the hostile creature. At least as written that’s what it looks like.
So that means if the creature is prone then you still don’t get disadvantage which is really neat when you think about it.
Don’t miss: heavy crossbow 5e, sharpshooter 5e, gunner feat 5e.
And the third part when you use the attack action and attack with the one-handed weapon you can use a bonus action to attack with a hand cross but you’re holding. Very cool, really does add a utility to it with old doobly older feat stuff like that.
That being said, you can not make more than one attack with the hand crossbow 5e like this. Reason being the crossbow still has the ammunition tag attached to it and what that means is you need at least one hand free to load it.
So if you have a sword in one hand your hand crossbow in another hand, there’s no way you can possibly load it without dropping your swords you’re still limited to the one shot. Is crossbow expert a good feat? It’s still really good though, you as essentially gets you an extra attack when you think about it. Which is neat. With that out of the way let’s take a quick look at my personal thoughts.
Thoughts
Is this feat worth it ranger? Yes of course it is the perfect feat to take for any rogues and rangers looking to maximize their crossbow damage. In terms of who benefits from this most, anyone with multi attack should for sure get this. It makes the crossbow far more usable because you can tag a more than once with it. If you have a magical crossbow that automatically loads itself and thus doesn’t have the ammunition proponent you can also essentially turn it into a machine gun. Even while we’re holding an another weapon.
The artificer has a really cool subclass that lets you kind of do just that but since it’s not really can and yet. I can’t really recommend you use it. So in terms of who benefits most from this! Fighters, predominantly would depending on what kind of a character you’re playing your paladin might as well and anyone with multi attack. Alright!
Conclusion
That being said guys! I hope you all have a great day and as always happy adventuring. If you have any cool uses for this feat or any cool stories belonging to it please put it down in the comments below. I love reading them and i know everyone else checking out this article does as well. Also read is dragon crossbow worth it.