A review of the Nestor: It sucks

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Click bait aside, I really wanted to make this ship work. I fell in love with the concept at first sight when I saw it on the Eve University wiki. It’s just so…flawed.

I’ll work my way down the listed bonuses and point out where almost each and every one fails miserably.

+50% drone HP/Damage - One of the few good things about the ship. It’s no Dominix Navy, but it’s a solid bonus for a 125 bandwidth droneboat.

20% armor resistance - Due to the unique undermassed nature of the ship, mass increases provide an overly strong malus to maneuverability.

The Nestor can fit into C1 WHs, but only if it has no armor plates onlined. This can make keeping up with a fleet of smaller ships into a tedious mess of offlining and re-onlining any armor plates you might have equipped.

You can work around this by relying on active armor repair, but it does leave you with a very small armor pool.

+50% laser range - On paper, this looks like a good bonus. Sadly, there are two key issues that turn this into a sour lemon.

  1. The Nestor is a drone boat. Adding more range to the already long optimal reach of laser weaponry makes it difficult to stay within drone control range. Especially if you’re using Scorch ammo.

  2. The Nestor has a freakishly undersized power grid. Less than T1 battleships even. Attempting to use the stronger Mega Pulse Lasers will easily devour 88% of your entire power grid even at max skills.

+50% probe scan strength - No cloak bonuses means you’re out in the open while scanning. A very good way of getting dropped on. Especially in wormholes. Fitting a normal cloak will utterly destory your scan res.

Hacking - Absolutely not. The Nestor is far too slow, and handles like a drunken cow skating on ice with any kind of large sized prop mod on.

Remote Armor repair - Absolutely pathetic. Low speed and low remote repair reach means the Nestor struggles to actually repair anyone in the thick of battle that isn’t parked within 30km-ish range of you.

Especially when you then factor in that this is a range bonused laser/drone boat who wants to be 50~60km away from the action.

In general - I’ve already mentioned the abnormally weak power grid, but I do need to hammer home just how restrictive it is. Even at max skills the Nestor’s power grid barely clears 14000, and remeber. This is a laser/armor ship. Both of which are very power grid heavy.

The slots - This is an armor ship. Why does it have 6 mid slots and 6 lows? Move one of those mids down to low, please. Especially since

The Nestor is very fragile - Brutal acceleration times (22+ seconds to 75% speed with 100/500 props) makes it very difficult to maneuver and kite attackers. In addition, the 6 low slots makes it very difficult to fit a reliable amount of tank onto the ship.

So at the end of the day you have a ship that is:

Slow.
Difficult to fit.
Has weak dps and weak remote support.
Is fragile.
Highly niche.
And last of all, but certainly not least, expensive. This ship’s hull is only slightly under the cost of a marauder’s while bringing significantly less to the table.

Thank you for your time.

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Done25’s review of the Nestor: It sucks

Snarky reply aside, it has a lot of unique bonuses that you don’t seem to appreciate. What are you trying to use it for? Shooting lasers? There are a lot of cheaper ships that can do that better.

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I mean, that’s pretty much the point I made at the end? It’s a super expensive hull whos power struggles to match the price tag.

It sucks at lasers due to low PG, it sucks at remote repair due to weak bonuses, and tactical cruisers are safer at scanning thanks to Cov-Ops and getting to fit Expanded Probe Launcher for free.

Drones are the only thing it does semi-well.

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Youve just described stratios.

Idk, try to make a little research yourself before posting? Nestor | Losses | Ship | zKillboard feel free to educate yourself.

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The Stratios is an inferior tactical cruiser. It’s only upsides are being faster to skill into, and the ability to enter 3 and 4 rated DED sites in high sec.

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Isn’t Nestor the #1 ship choice for missile firewalling in the current meta?

Edit: Also aren’t there some WH fleet comps that use it? I forget, I think it was for logi. I could be misremembering here (outside my area of expertise).

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It didn’t always have this price tag, its only since the new parts got added to the bp. It it massively over priced now largely but not entirely down to the major use case by affluent wormholers.

The Nestor is a fantastic ship and yes niche, for that niche there is nothing else, in fact many people want a shield rep BS equiv its so unique. Its also banned in the AT (alliance tournament) as its the only rr bs in game and it works like a mobile depot for fleet mates allowing them to swap modules in space.

With sentry drones and t1 crystals its one of the cheapest battleships for running missions in regards to overheads, can get near enough a 200km snipe range. Its not a marauder sure but shitting out t2 ammo at that rate isn’t free.

The rep power of the Nestor with just a couple of medium remote reps can keep drones alive and tanking in so many pve cases you don’t need much tank, and its that low mass that makes it a nimble mofo. It has more than enough low slots to fit a beefy tank if that’s whats needed.

If ccp could influence the ship to have a lower price, around 600/800 mil by adjusting the levers for the new parts a touch, I think its probably worth about that for what it does.

edit: typo plus I should probably also mention the drone bay, The Nestor drone bay is huge, pretty sure its the biggest sub cap drone bay.

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Smartbombing - Is it? I’m not sure why that would be. A Leshak is half the price and spends only half the capacitor for SB usage.

Logi - Yes, but only because it has almost zero competition. The only other RR bonused battleship is the Leshak. The Guardian semi-counts because it can fit Large Remote Repair units, but it’s still only a cruiser and lacks the Nestor’s drone dps.

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Exactly, its just one of the those ships that you can go most of the game never needing but if your in the niche groups that do use them its in demand, and those groups happen to be doing content that makes lots of isk.

Its also one of those ships, like the Talos or the Exequor that have very attractive ship models but don’t have a wide use spectrum.

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If the Nestor has only 600~800 million instead of 1.4 billion I’d be a lot less harsh on it. That’s a lot of ISK for a ship that’s specifically made for use in super high risk content.

As for mission/anon ratting, I feel like the Armageddon Navy is straight up superior to the Nestor. Much larger power grid. +50% damage to both lasers and missiles for better damage selection/application.

The only thing the Nestor has advantage in is drone bay size, but rat aggro is fairly easy to manage so long as you deploy the correctly sized drones and keep close enough.

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Yeah. For example.

It’s not about capacitor usage. The armor resist per level (+20%) ensure it has higher base armor EHP than a Leshak (25.3k vs 21.4k). And the base mass is far far lower (20M kg vs 78M kg) ensuring you can… you know… actually maneuver the thing to be a missile firewall in the first place.

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The lower mass thing is actually a trap. Props add mass when turned on, which causes the game to think you’re using an oversized prop mod becuase your base mass is so low. That’s why the Nestor needs 22 seconds to reach 75% max speed with a 100mn Afterburner. (Leshak only need 17 seconds.)

It also handles like total ass and will often grossly overshoot where you tell it to go if you don’t slow down/stop early.

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It’s really not. It is just another thing to consider when piloting.

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Hoy moly… the Nestor is among the best ships you can buy for money with it’s large set of boni for HeavyArmor Doctrines.

It just isn’t a good solo ship, like… most Battleships (maybe thats why they are called Battleships).

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It is though? 100mn AB needs 22 seconds to hit 75% max speed. Add in a 1600 mm plate and it becomes 23 seconds. The Nestor is a slug even by battleship standards.

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I’m always nervous when people bring up the Nestor lol

Either for nerfing or buffings you just never know with CCP, would be nice to see the data they have for it.

In regards to the the OP, what would you do to improve it? The navy domi should probably have more drone damage as its Gallente and Faction. I guess that’s offset by the size of the drone bay as that fits with the SOE line, the Astero and Strat both have big bays for there class.

The SOE line also sells itself as the explorer line of vessels, with them operating largely in wormhole space themselves, its very much by design geared for WH use. The scanning bonus I assume is for that, it can run the larger sleeper caches, tank defenses and just mjd the rooms

If the PG was increased what are all the outcomes? What cant you fit due to power?

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Who cares. You’re not flying a Battleship doctrine to align out quickly, and you’re certainly not piloting a firewall Nestor as part of a big group to be the first to warp out, and whoever is battleship fleet anchor knows about turning armor bricks and is not doing 180 degree turns regularly, and whoever is piloting the Nestor is probably just increasing/decreasing their top speed to position themselves alongside whoever is the missile target.

Disclaimer: I’ve fought against people using firewalling Nestors but haven’t piloted one myself.

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You cited maneuverability for the sake of firewalling. I’m merely pointing out that the Nestor is actually kind of ■■■■ at getting from point A to point B in a timely manner due to its unique mass/inertia ratings.

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Yes I did, and time-to-align out to warp has nothing to do with the piloting required for firewalling in a fleet battle scenario. And if you’re being anchor for a multi-billion Battleship sized fleet that is an Armor comp and relying on firewalling mitigation, you are probably skilled enough know how to not slingshot your fleet and feed that multi-billion ISK.

But feel free to reach out to Snuffed Out leadership (the example killmail I showed with the fit) and tell them they are firewalling with the wrong hull.

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For improvements the very first thing I’d do is raise the base PG to 15000, or a role bonus to laser PG usage. Then I’d move one of its mid slots to low.

From there maaaaybe shift 10% of base shield to armor?

I also feel like it could use some love as an actual exploration ship. The devs clearly don’t want it having any kind of cloak access. Perhaps a buff to scan deviation or speed?

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