The Entire shipline for the Sisters of EVE includes the Astero, Stratios, and the Nestor. Of these 3 - the astero and stratios can both fit covert cloaks and take covert bridges.
As we are aware, a black ops battleship is a ship designed to be able to jump people into another system via a covert cyno, industrial cyno or a cyno field.
With this in mind I believe we should give capsuleers a taste of blackops capability and furthermore possibly drive up the price and reason to get a Nestor by introducing bridge capability to the Nestor and to an extent, allow the nestor to jump drive on its own.
To add to this, we could fully allow it to have cloaked bonuses similar to a blackops battleship.
What do you think of these possible additions? How could we improve the changes?
I don’t think we should have any battleships with covert ops cloaks. Warping while cloaked is incredibly strong, only compensated by the usual lower defences of the covert ops ships compared to other ships of that size. The Nestor however isn’t a flimsy low EHP battleship in any way though.
And as Wadiest already shared, the Nestor has a lot of strengths already and doesn’t need a jump drive. If you want a black ops battleship with jump drive there are multiple options already.
We absolutely need a Covert Ops-capable battleship - especially with the introduction of the new Dealthless battlecruiser. The only players that continually complain about covert ops on a battleship are the ones perpetually gate-camping low-sec.
Sorry, but screw them. Everyone else has had their gameplay upended in the past year, so they can just suck it up like everyone else.
Maybe a new covert ops battleship designed for it, but not by slapping the massive benefit of a covert ops cloak on a battleship that is already strong.
CCP can always add a line of T2 covops battleships to all of the main four factions.
There’s no reason you cannot have both a covops ship and a regular ship with cloak bonuses and other strengths in the same faction, just look at the Prospect and Endurance.
That said, as someone who enjoys covops gameplay I do believe covops gameplay is strong enough already and may not need a covops battleship.
If the covert BS (CBS) are weaker than the blops once on the field (eg with reduced range), they would be less used than blops though still possible o jump thanks to their covert cloak, except if the price is really lower ?
So we need ships that have a lower performance/cost ratio than blops so that it’s better to jump blops rather than bridge the CBS.
I think it would be nice to have more T2 BS, the hyperion/rokh/abaddon/maelstrom don’t have a T2 variation and they feel sad.
Maybe make them use XL rapid guns as a mimick, just like bombers use the torpedoes ?
It would make them sieged/bastioned killers -with enough numbers - allowing them to deploy increaseed ordonnance at a higher cost than blops, but with reduced range, and then warping off cloaked, while still doing less damage than a marauder, less projection (even less than blops), and having lower defensive/placement capabilities.
Before, the reason to not add cloak on the nestor, was that it is better in many ways than other ships : only the astero and stratios have correct tanking, but even double plated the stratios has barely BC tank level(30k) . I know T3C can reach 100k HEP but in practice they do nothing else. Nestor with 2 plates and a DC already has over 100k( I know, meme are better) . with 1k DPS from drones and guns and room for ewar in the mids. For 1.1B, that is, LESS than the hull price of a redeemer.
CCP opened the pandora box with the cenotaph, though its high cost makes it impractical to apply their OP DPS (or maybe their price is high because DPS is OP ?) .
Exactly. So there’s no longer any reason not to give the Nestor covert ops cloaking capability. Any T2 battleship hull will still out-tank and out-gun a Nestor.
The only T2 BS hulls that can compare to it are the blops, if we talk about covert.
The nestor out-DPS, out-tank, out-utility, out-RR, out-align, out-mass, out-price the blops. The only way it is worse, is regarding its sub-warp and warp speed - and of course its absence of covert jump.
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You could improve the discussion by explaining how I am wrong, eg how my claims are insufficiently valid or unrelated. You don’t improve the discussion by repeating the same thing, or when claiming that your personal taste are more important than the general balance of the game.
Tell me how you think this would help the game : by making the nestor usable to move goods through LS ? By making them better than T3C at hunting people in plexes ?
the Nestor is already an incredibly strong ship, especially in j-space with its very low mass.
adding jump drives and/or covops cloaks to it would be a little much imo.
