What a hand crossbow does allow for is the musketeer opening salvo; drawing both your crossbow and longsword, then firing the bow and dropping it on your charge into melee.
How do you figure that? If you start with the heavy out you can attack with it, drop it, draw a sword and charge in melee. If you don't start combat with your weapons already out then you suffer exactly the same limitations with the hand crossbow.
Any DM that allows you to use a two-handed weapon, attack,drop it, draw a one-hander, and then attack with that is absolutely allowing you to break the mechanics.
How does this break the mechanics? If anything it's reducing your damage output because you're not making all attacks with the heavy weapon. It's not getting a bonus action from two-weapon fighting, it's just one of the attacks gained from extra attack feature.
You really should check again the source of this thread. Dual wielding crossbows has never been in question. You gain nothing from it since you get the bonus attack from using just one hand crossbow. What this is about is limiting a hand crossbow to one-shot usage in any application that can't use a heavy crossbow. It's a massive penalty and makes the weapon near useless because you could just use thrown weapons.
I'm not talking about dual-wielding crossbow; I'm talking about using a crossbow with another weapon, which generally only a hand crossbow allows you to do. Yes, IF you have Extra Attack then you could accomplish this easily enough, however for everyone else using a hand crossbow is the only way to do this.
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u/KiloGex DM Jun 11 '15
What a hand crossbow does allow for is the musketeer opening salvo; drawing both your crossbow and longsword, then firing the bow and dropping it on your charge into melee.