Ok there are about 2-4 arguments going on in this thread... I think.

I´ll add some perspective and feel free to disagree or ignore at your leisure.

Player A Is a Valor bard using swift quiver, disease, bestow curse and some such to increase his damage alot(most of this helps the party but takes a while to set up), since presumably he is too starved for attribute points to get more than 1 or 2 feats at the most(lets use point buy for convenience). Number of attacks 4(5 with haste)

Player B Is a Warlock 2/Sorcerer rest, doing double eldritch blasts each round(not optimal but this is a mental exercise) 4 Beams at 5, 6 at 11 and 8 at 17.(fighter 2 for a hilarious 12 in one round)

Player C is a Bow wielding Eldritch knight with Haste(duh!) 2 attacks at lvl 5, 3 Attacks at 11, 3 attacks + Haste at 14, 4 attacks + Haste at 20.

Player D is just like Player C but has a heavy crossbow with expert so his damage goes up by 1 per attack on average(in one game he has 1 attack + 1 haste attack unless he pays for a repeating crossbow of some sort, even though player A and B can fly, teleport out of close combat and have full spell progression)

Player E Uses a Hand crossbow and crossbow expert Since we are going for max attacks he gets one extra from crossbow expert and using hand crossbow(or bows whatever) Number of attacks 10.


Ok, I´m not really great with dpr calculations but the hand crossbow is d6 and the longbow is d8, so you lose 1 point of damage per attack, you gain an extra attack the is on average 8,5 so you are losing a net 1,5 damage but since we are probably going for marksman you can subtract the 1,5 from the 10 you get from marksman netting you a 8,5 increase in damage per round if all of your attacks hit(they probably wont) at Lvl 20.

Since the damage for Heavy crossbow is d10 you gain a point of damage on each of the attacks so you actually get more damage by using a Heavy crossbow granted this is half a point of damage.

/Irony

Holy **** letting a hand crossbow get a bonus attack from itself is SO OVER POWERED that it reduces your damage compared to a heavy crossbow by half a point(at level 20) OP AS **** AMARITE?!

/Irony off

If anybody can do the math on a-e that be super but I´m sure they are somewhat similar but again more of a perspective thing maybie if we actually drag out all of the numbers we can find out if this is AN EXPLOIT or not.

Also I don´t like how the word exploit has become a negative word. How else do you win battles other than exploiting the weakness of the enemy or exploiting your own strength?

I´m assuming it has something to with MMO´s and a reference to exploits from there.

Also props for spell checker wanting to rename Eldritch to Britches :D