EVE New Citizens Q&A

Isn't that a bit redundant? Therm/Kin are the two best averaging holes through shield and armor. Why have weaker bonuses to worse damage types?

"Racial flavoring" without nutering the ship in other damage types.

(see: the DEVs try to adhere to a principle of "semi-locked" damage profiles for each race... to encourage variety)

I'm not sure about the hookbill but I know with the Drake, and I think the hookbill is the same, a few years back CCP changed that up. Prior to that the Caldari were really the only race that could select damage types. I mean in theory the Gallente could but drone damage was different back then and for example the Amarr drones just did **** poor damage but had good range and the Gallente drones had good damage but poor range and tracking so it came down more to engagement specifics more than damage types.

So the point is that Caldari could just choose what ever damage type and apply it exactly the same. Combine that with the fact that missiles will pretty much hit the same every time created a situation where the Caldari race was the hands down favorite for mission runners. Back then the Minmatar were the hands down favorite for solo PvP and the Amarr put out more dps than any other race with a really good tank but were slow as heck. The Gallente were kind of a jack of all trades master of none.

CCP decided that they wanted to "balance" all the races. If you ask me it's not balance it's homogenization. Back then each race has it's strengths and weaknesses and all things considered I think that they were fairly well balanced. Now they just made all the races the same. It's not balance it's lack of variety.

Ok off of my rant on balancing and back to the topic I guess the short answer would be since Caldari's guns are Hybrids they wanted to give them a missile bonus that would reflect that.

AFAIK the kinetic bonus has been a thing since at least 2007 on most caldari ships. and the change to general missile damage bonuses are pretty new. The main ship I remember not being locked in with a kinetic damage bonus was the Raven which got a generic rate of fire bonus. With the drake the kinetic damage bonus went from 5 to 10% per level, but the ship lost a launcher, so its kinetic dps stayed about the same, but it lost dps with every other damage type. not sure how many other ships got changed in the same way.

with the hookbill it has limited launchers, but the bonus is there to effectively give it a normal amount of launchers but needing to fit less. so 3 launchers is 6 effective launchers with kinetic, but 4.5 effective launchers with any other damage type.