Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey everyone. We have another set of balance changes to talk about today. We've been keeping a close eye on the Nestor battleship and we're planning to make a few small but significant changes to it in the Hyperion release.

The most significant change by far is that we are increasing the drop rate of the Drone Nexus chips that can be converted to Sisters of EVE ship BPCs quite dramatically. These should now drop much more often from all types of "Sentient" rogue drone commander NPCs, especially from the Sentient Alvus battleships.
This should go a long way to helping bring the price of the Nestor down from its current levels.

Secondly, we are adding a new function to the Nestor that fits well with its role as a group support vessel. We are giving the Nestor a 5000m3 Ship Maintenance Bay that will allow friendly ships to refit when they are nearby.

Additionally, we are reducing the Nestor's signature radius a bit from the current 465m to 420m.

We are also making some changes to the mass and the sensor strength of the Nestor, as mentioned in this update post.

Mass: 20,000,000 (-36,000,000)
Inertia: 0.35 (+0.17)
Velocity: 70 (-22)
Magnetometric Sensor Strength: 30 (+6)

We know that some of you will be unsatisfied with the fact that we're not adding covert cloak or jump drive capabilities or some other completely new role to the Nestor with this pass. We won't rule out the possibility of future changes but we are first going to observe the results of these adjustments in Hyperion.

As always, we welcome your feedback in this thread.

Thanks
-Fozzie

+1 for cheaper Nestors

interesting adding some genuine uniqueness .. what it also tells us is that Rise is far too conservative with changes .. since every change he does needs further changes later on down the line ... please give him a kick up the arse for us please

I give this a neat/10

or we have too wait for months for any meaningful changes .. in the meantime we are stuck waiting for those said changes too actually occur

Fun suggestion: Reduce the Nestor's mass, but add a ship "bonus" that increases the mass when running a prop mod so it won't be super fast . Then they might see more use in w-space.

So I am not sure how often the nestor is used for the hacking stuff. In my opinion a battleships is not really suited for that type of operation, nor do I know how effective the +10 Virus bonus is. I would recommend making all battleship classes focused onto Combat type usage, not utility like hacking. That being said I would look into removing the +10 virus thing and give it a Cap usage reductions for armor repairers or energy turrets. I would keep the scan probe bonus for its amazing combat usage.

so this ship maintenance .. does the ship have too be static too access it or just orbit super close ??
also if the ship is being shot at how does that ineract?

indeed you are ... i think the disparity between the nestor mass and the rest of the battleships is too much .. i would propose that other battleships should be brought down closer .. at least the attack battleships anyway..

Thinking about this, the virus strength of the Nestor has always seemed like a weird carrot to me. Currently, it's as strong as the Astero and Stratios. This means, given the low strength of the rats (if any indeed exist) and otherwise low danger of these sites, there is little reason to risk such an expensive and (relatively speaking) slow ship doing these sites. Have you considered raising the virus strength to 15 for the Nestor? I'm not sure if this would be a meaningful increase, but it would at least cause people to have to decide if the increase in hacking power would be worth the risk.