>>1086411
>iirc w5 brimstone should be on par with w1 heartstring
Nocturne is around P2~P3 The Brimstone in terms of peak damage, excluding the CA/Ultimate buff.
However, The Brimstone doesn't have 100% peak ATK% buff uptime, far from it.
P4 and especially P5 The Brimstone is
considerably ahead of Nocturne in terms of peak damage, so it'll need a deliberate lineup advantage to outperform it.
Pairing S11 with Seed is a two-fold disadvantage for The Brimstone - you get a 1000 flat ATK buff, saturating the ATK% buff, and you get considerably less S11 field time, meaning the average stack count drops as well.
Nocturne is a great stat stick, but you can't compare it to The Brimstone directly.
50% CRIT DMG become progressively worse as your build improves. Meanwhile, combat ATK% gets
better together with your build.
Additionally, the way you'd adjust your build to fit in Nocturne also devalues it. Inferno Metal is still the best set by a landslide, but running it with a 24% CRIT Chance W-Engine means your sub-stats mostly go into ATK% and CRIT DMG%, the latter is crazy saturated and the former is still lower-value than CRIT sub-stats despite the saturation.
i.e. a 40 sub-stat S11 build running The Brimstone can (and usually will) be a stronger overall build than a 40 sub-stat S11 build running Nocturne, counting strictly the drive disc value.
P1 Nocturne is pretty much always better than P1 The Brimstone, same with P2 as well. Maybe excluding the solo S11 runs.