Ecliptic Rift

After my examination of the Firetail, let’s take a look at the changes to the Caldari Navy Hookbill coming in the Dominion expansion. Like the Firetail, the Hookbill will get major changes to its bonuses and thus role: primarily it will become a missile boat rather than tanking with split damage.

Missiles

Prior to Dominion, the Hookbill has a 10% shield capacity bonus and 10% small hybrid turret falloff bonus, each per level of Caldari Frigate skill. These bonuses will get removed in favor of missile damage and velocity bonuses: 20% kinetic missile damage, 10% other missile damage, and 10% missile velocity. To go along with this, the ship will no longer have any turrets, only 3 launchers.

This compares favorably with the other Caldari missile frigate, the Kestrel. This ship has one extra launcher but half the damage bonus (10% to kinetic, 5% to other) and no velocity bonus. The Minmatar missile frigate, the Breacher, gets 3 launchers, similar bonuses to the Kestrel (though the 10% is for explosive damage rather than kinetic), and a turret.

In fact, this starts to look more like the Hawk assault frigate, though without the shield boost bonus.

Design

Despite the loss of the shield capacity bonus, the Hookbill still will have a decent tank. Instead of the old 4/4/3 setup, the new Hookbill will have a 3/5/2 layout, allowing for more shield tanking modules in the mid slots. A 10% boost in the powergrid (from 150 to 165 MW) will help with the fitting, of course.

Similar to the Firetail, the revised frigate will have less capacitance but faster recharge (362 to 281 GJ but 234 to 187.5 seconds). The scan resolution will also increase from 550 to 600 mm, which won’t completely change anyone’s life but is welcome anyway. And while the Hookbill won’t start winning any races, the nearly 40% speed increase from 268 to 370 m/s shouldn’t go unnoticed. Slightly offsetting this, CCP will increase the inertia modifier by about 35%, from 2.44 to 3.3.

Overall, the new ship might not score a lot of points with Caldari hybrid pilots, but in general the ship becomes a far nastier mission ship. While regular level 1s might not pay out well enough to justify the expense, the revised Hookbill could see some use by militia units in the State Protectorate.

Next: the Gallente Navy Comet

Related posts:

1. Naval frigate upgrades: Federation Navy Comet
2. Naval frigate upgrades: Imperial Navy Slicer
3. Naval frigate upgrades: Republic Fleet Firetail