Missions & Complexes

So am I correct that you pretty much never want T2 Railguns for PVE? The T2 guns are harder to fit, but have no damage benefit over Meta4 and only a very small range benefit. And that's also based on the general wisdom I hear that you don't use T2 ammo for PVE for cost reasons.

Hybrids are the only thing I've trained so far - are other weapon systems like that too?

Check again....

T2 rails do up to 10% more damage than meta 4 due to the spec skill. Since that is rarely trained to 5, you're usually looking at 8% extra instead of 10%.

T2 ammunition is situational. Spike L normally provides more range than is useful, but if you need the range it's a great option. I used it on a Naga running Serpentis Blockade for example. Javelin L can be nice for its tracking bonus and is less niche than Spike.

As for cost -- pretty much anything that helps you put more damage on target is worth the investment. T2 ammo does that under the right circumstances. In other circumstances, faction ammo is better -- and it's actually more expensive.

Other long range guns follow basically the same pattern: the long range ammo usually but not always provides more range than needed, while the short range ammunition helps you track under the right circumstances.

Short range guns are rather different. Blasters are usually considered too short to really matter, but both pulse lasers and autocannons see use. In both cases, the long range ammunition (Scorch and Barrage) is de rigueur for putting damage downrange. Scorch in particular basically makes pulses worthwhile, applying ~80% of short range ammunition damage at ~3x the range.

Missiles are a bit different. Guided missiles (as long as we're still calling them that; the long range ones) benefit from both T2 types -- Fury to put more damage on large targets and Precision for taking down smaller ones. Unguided missiles (same caveat; the short range ones) absolutely require Javelin to extend their range. Meta 4 torp launchers are considered pretty worthless in missions with their low range cap. Rage isn't as useful simply because it only applies full damage to huge, fat, slow targets.

Oh, and another difference between missiles and guns: missile specs increase rate of fire rather than raw damage. One interesting side effect of this is that not only are meta 4 launchers roundly outperfomed by T2, higher meta (that is, faction) launchers also have lower DPS than T2 with spec 3 or higher.

Thanks everyone. For some reason I thought that the Specialization bonus was only when the T2 ammo is loaded, my bad.
That's why my EFT was off - I'm just training Small Rail Spec 4 now so I can start on Med Rail/Blaster Spec 1, so EFT wouldn't have showed me the diff. And running up to Spec 3 is super quick, so that's a easy choice.

It used to be a tracking penalty. The patch with the hybrid changes modifed all long range gun short range ammo (Javelin, Gleam, and Quake) to have a tracking bonus instead of a penalty.