
You can shoot your pre-loaded hand crossbow on round 1 and move into melee. Generally speaking, unless you are building around the hand crossbow, the light crossbow is better. For specialized hand crossbow archery builds, you can do things that are not possible to do with a light crossbow.

For characters that do not have the crossbow expert feat or multi-attack, generally speaking, a light crossbow will serve them better.
#OFF HAND CROSSBOW FREE#
It just involves some complicated drawing/sheathing/dropping micromanagement to make sure you have free hands available to satisfy the Ammunition property whenever you're making a crossbow shot, so it's really not worth the headache, unless your Crossbow is Repeating due to an infusion or as a bonafide magic item. If you can get over it being a little different narrative flavor than offhand crossbow conveys, mechanically it is far easier to blend two one-handed melee weapons than it is to blend a one-handed melee weapon and a one-handed ranged weapon.īut again, Crossbow Expert does work to let you make a Bonus Action attack with your Hand Crossbow after using the Attack action to either slash with your Scimitar or shoot with the Hand Crossbow. Or if you have Extra Attack, you could do something like Attack, slash with the Scimitar, throw the Dagger, Bonus Action slash with the Scimitar, or. or the reverse, start with a Dagger throw or stab, and then Bonus Action slash with the Scimitar. So yes, you can start with a Scimitar and Dagger in each hand, Attack, and either attack with the Scimitar and Bonus Action throw or stab with the the Dagger. It also doesn't have any weird properties requiring two hands to use it. So moving away from a crossbow and scimitar, as duel wielding really doesn’t seem like it works or happens with them - how would it play to duel wielding a scimitar and dagger or something like that?Ī dagger is a "melee weapon" and is Light, meaning it's useable with Two-Weapon Fighting (even when thrown). Repeating crossbows would literally solve it all wouldnt it? It also allows you to dual wield non light weapons like 2 warhammers, but that might not be so useful to you in this caseīoth Two-Weapon Fighting and the Dual Wielder feat specifies melee weapons so neither will work with a hand-crossbow. There is a dual wielding feat that removes that negative as well as giving a +1 to ac which is quite nice. So in this case you would make an attack with one of your weapons to deal 1d6+dex damage, and your second attack would be with your bonus action and deal 1d6 damage with no modifiers. This balances out because dual wielding lets you make an attack with your bonus action to improve your action economy. your strength bonus to a greataxe damage or dexterity to a longbow shot, however when you dual wield you lose that bonus to the damage of your off hand weapon.

Usually when you make a weapon attack you add your skill bonus to the damage with that weapon ie. Monstrous Compendium Vol 3: Minecraft Creaturesīoth the hand crossbow and scimitar have the light property so you can use them one in each hand without needing a feat.
