EVE Online

Which is the best Nano ship for soloing and small roaming gangs of up to 3 people?

There is no one single best.

The 'ideal ones' would depend on your gang composition.

My personal favorites are probably the Zealot and Curse.

If I could choose a gang composition of three I'd choose a Curse, a Zealot and a Huginn.
Huginn to catch other nano'd ships, do a bit of it's own dps and stop people crawling back to gates / dock range while having the gang maintain a safe distance. 
Curse to destroy the cap on ships with a heavy tank, provide the gang with a bit of saftey from guns (tracking disruptor) and do a bit of it's own dps with Hobgoblin IIs.  Armor maintence drones in the bay for when one of you leaks into armor and you don't have the ability to repair in stations and opening up the possibility of in-combat or in-space logistics.
Pulse Zealot set up for damage as they track very well and do boatloads of dps for taking down targets quickly (able to do 600+ with faction MF or Conflag).
Reason I wouldent replace the Zealot for an Ishtar is with the curse the gang may become too reliant on drones and have all of its dps killed easily by smartbombs, missiles etc.  Also the Zealot set up for damage does every bit as much dps as an Ishtar and then some, without having to wait for the drone travel time of Heavy drones or having to deal with deploying and recalling drones.

Thanks a lot for the info. I've been reading up on Amarrian hacs for a while now and the Zealot sparked my interest as it really shines in gang setups but it seems to have a few shortcomings for solo purposes. How does the curse fare in that regard?

Can you elaborate on what you understand to be the Zealots shortcomings in solo?

I'm quite happy with it as a solo ship.

I use a couple of cap power relays to make it more sustainable when I'm solo and usually fork out for a 28km warp disruptor to get a bit more operating range.. But most of the time I do that for gangs too.  I find it's perfectly fine as a solo ship.

It's drawbacks are that it has a bit of trouble against ships with well tracking guns as it has no defense in that regard. 

Ships with good tracking guns and medium range can give me a bit of trouble, Pulse Absolution with good tracking hurts and I usually will disengage very quickly if theyre able to track me.  Yet to find an Astarte that can give me trouble but I'm sure one properly set up with good skills and using Null could hit me.

A couple of minmatar ships with AC's and Barrage loaded with good skills can give me a tiny bit of greif but I have 87.5% base explosive resistance on my shields.  Warrior II's are not much of a problem for the same reason, and only a few people use Hobgoblin II's which are the only real drones that I'm worried about.

Heavy missiles and cruise missiles are usually little problem for me, even without implants I can speed tank most missiles.

Heavy neuts usually have 21-25km range, and this is another area where my faction warp disruptor comes in handy.  If I dont have the 28K scram and I cant keep them pinned down without going in heavy neut range I will disengage from the fight.

Now for the curse, it of course does not suffer the drawback of vulnerability to some guns as it has a tracking disruptor, but it has one very fatal drawback of if you choose to engage an enemy that can last a moderate period of time and is intelligent he will just kill all your drones and then you're screwed.

The curse has an excellent defensive option, whereby if you get happen to tackled you neut the hell out of whoever is tackling you until their web/disruptor turn off and you're able to warp out.

A fast Deimos could possibly tackle me and take me out pretty quick. 
They can hit 2.7km/s by just overloading a MWD with no speed mods. 

Combined with 13km web range (overloaded) I always make sure to maintain a good amount of distance as there isnt much of a buffer trying to orbit within 24km.  

Sometimes that means they escape but so be it.  To me its not worth fighting someone decent who can quickly manouver to counter my orbit and overload their web and MWD and tackle me as I'll go down very bloody quickly.  If they stick around long enough and don't look very fast, I'll go in a bit closer to make sure I keep them tackled or I'll overload my point if they start to get a bit too far.

This goes for most HAC's that have room for a microwarp drive and a web.  Anything smaller will just be BBQ'd by 500+ dps if they try to engage.  Battlecruiser sized are generally way too slow to accelerate and won't be able to get within 13km.

Again thanks a lot for the information provided.  My knowledge about the game is still very limited.  Regarding the Zealots shortcomings there were a few threads I stumbled upon on the eve boards where the Zealots solo ability was commented on:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=769833

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=502433   (this one's a bit dated though)

http://www.eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=3_25&page=2

For solo purposes I'm still leaning more towards the curse and vagabond though. How does the selection of ships the curse can take on without much worries compare to that of the zealot?

Firstly almost none of them seem to have any clue on how to set up a nano Zealot let alone how to fly one. (Magical 6 hi-slot Zealots, lowslots of 3 Nanos with 2 Polycarbons and Nos Zealots spells that out for you)

Secondly theyre talking about NOS like it's still 2005.  Almost nobody uses nos these days as it's nowhere near as effective as it used to be.  The closest thing you're going to see is heavy neuts which will ruin any HACs day, not just the Zealot.

The Zealot has a very strong base capacitor and it's very easy to capitalize on it with some recharge. A small cap booster on a nano Zealot is complete waste of a mid slot on it, plus you're only going to be able to hold around 10 small charges with overdrives and will run out very quickly anyway.

For this same reason the 'it sucks at solo because you can't fit a LSE on it' is not true as you put a LSE in that midslot.  Trying to armor tank nano ships makes them cap very unstable.  Don't get caught up in the whole "Amarr = Armor tanking" thing when it comes to Nano setups.  It's close to impossible to get a even remotley comparable speed, dps, agility and cap sustainability if you try to armor tank. The idea is not to take large armounts of damage.