so ive been flying whoops and a 3inch toothpick for about a year now and i think im ready to move up to a proper 5inch freestyle setup. problem is i really dont want to spend three weekends sourcing parts and soldering everything if i can avoid it, last time i built something from scratch i fried an esc because i was rushing and it kinda put me off for a while.

anyway i was looking at the Diatone Roma F5 V2 because a guy at my local club has one and it looks solid, flies smooth too from what i could see. but im also seeing people mention the iflight Nazgul and the iFlight Chimera which i think is the long range version? not totally sure. budget is probably around 250-300 shipped.

main question is - with prebuilts at this price range do you usually still need to do a lot of tuning out of the box or do they fly decent enough to at least have fun while you dial it in. i run Betaflight and im not scared of the configurator but i dont want to spend more time debugging than flying if that makes sense

the Roma F5 is genuinely a good shout for that budget, had mine for about 8 months and the only thing i changed out of the box was the props because the stock ones felt a bit soft to me, went with HQ 5.1x3x3 and it made a noticeable difference in how locked in the rolls felt. stock tune is actually not bad - way better than the Nazgul i had before which needed quite a bit of work on the D term filtering before it stopped getting hot motors.

honestly at your level just get the Roma, do a 30min hover test, check motor temps, maybe bump up the master multiplier slightly if it feels sluggish, and go fly. you can always get deeper into the PIDs once you know what the quad actually feels like in the air vs what you want it to feel like. trying to tune blind before your first flight is a waste of time

i went through basically this same decision like 4 months ago lol. ended up with the Nazgul5 V3 and its fine but i honestly think the Roma might have been smarter for freestyle. the Nazgul feels more like it wants to go fast in a straight line if that makes sense? anyway both will need at least some tweaking, i dont think any prebuilt flies perfect stock, mine had some propwash on fast splits that i had to sort out but tbh a lot of that might have just been my flying