Thanks to extensive practice with the crossbow, you gain the following benefits:
You ignore the loading quality of 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.
Crossbow Expert: Lock ‘n Load
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Van Helsing: monster hunter. Certified badass. Wildly impractical wielder of crossbows with so many spinning gears and gadgets it probably can’t be considered a crossbow anymore. Despite the ludicrous fight scenes we get from blockbusters, I adore the monster hunter archetype with the gloomy trench coat, cowboy hat, and far too many hyper niche weapons to deal with every kind of beast you could find in fanfiction out there. Crossbow Expert is how you play that fantasy from levels one to four.
Mechanically, the feat struggles to hold water in the mid to upper tiers, but early, it can be pretty powerful. If you weren’t using your bonus action for anything else, this can feel like ranged multi-attack at level one while dual-wielding two hand crossbows. With a 30/120 ft. range, light property, and dealing 1d6 piercing damage a pop, you can have one of the most flexible ranged high damage dealers available. Paired with Hunter's Mark or Hex, you can shred down massive targets so long as they take more than two or three rounds to go down. Ignoring the loading quality basically makes crossbows usable ranged weapons when multi-attacking, and removing melee considerations means should your heart desire, you can get right up in monster’s faces with your favorite toy and decorate them with fancy bolt holes.
This power-gaming fantasy is unfortunately pretty short lived. A lot of builds in the game give you some form of extra attack with your bonus action; at a baseline, every character in the game can attack with two short swords every turn if they want to. If you’re looking only at simple weapons, you have daggers at minimum, meaning nearly every character you can come up with can have access to a 20/60 ft. ranged extra attack at level one. Crossbow Expert lets you keep dex mod on the second hit's damage, and does it with a slightly better range, but it also asks you to have a one hundred and fifty gold budget for both. That can be a tall order, and when you add on the feat cost, it becomes quite pricey.
There’s also the question of what characters make the best use out of this; as mentioned prior, it pairs well with cheap tools for extra on hit damage early, but those typically take your bonus action to get up and move about. Hex and Hunter’s Mark will work with it against enormous creatures with hundreds of hit points early, but that isn’t going to be an every encounter kind of enemy, and more of a once every few sessions. Rogues might consider it to try to get a more consistent way to get sneak attack, but you really want to be hiding or dashing with your cunning action each round, making the cost quite high.
Finally, there’s the Sharpshooter problem. Sharpshooter is another tool for ranged weapon builds that over doubles the average damage you put out with ranged weapons at the cost of a -5 to hit. That rate is exceptional. If you can pick between these two feats, unless the run and gun aesthetic is something you must have, you’re almost always better off with Sharpshooter.
Ultimately I think Crossbow Expert is a neat feat to start with on a variant human, but not something that is so powerful I’d consider taking it over an ability score improvement. It makes otherwise near-unusable weapons usable in extra attack builds, but you could instead just use a longbow and not have any of the loading issues. Upgrading to a heavy crossbow’s d10 damage for a feat just isn’t worth it; +2 Dex gives you as much of a damage upgrade AND adds to your hit modifier. I think more often than not you’ll find better feats for basically any build that’d consider this.
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