I can't believe they went that way with hand crossbows.
I'm not so sure. Lucky suggests that you're actually really friggin'... uhm... Lucky. What better way to show that then to turn Disadvantage into Advantage. I'm not even sure if it's really even over powered or anything. Just an interesting artifact of rules interaction.
You can operate it just, aim and shoot. you just need an extra hand to load it.So a Hand Crossbow is a one-handed weapon that takes two hands to operate.
You can operate it just, aim and shoot. you just need an extra hand to load it.
Just like using a pistol in real life, you can shoot it with one hand, but you need two hands to load it.
Rapier-and-hand-crossbow is still viable, I believe; characters can still interact with one object for free on their turn (PHB 190), and for me that would include loading a weapon.
I'm pretty sure the Lucky feat with disadvantage works like this: You roll 2d20 as you do when rolling with disadvantage, then you decide to use a luck point and roll an extra d20; you choose which 2 of the 3 dice will be used to determine disadvantage (like the 2 highest if you are smart). So basically you would end up using the middle value of the 3 dice. The last part where it says "...but you get to pick the die." probably refers to the die you will use for disadvantage, replacing one of the two that you initially rolled.