Based on the total amount of damage it took to kill the same number of mobs, the Khanda set were obviously higher level by a substantial amount. This average higher level is going to push down weapon damage, WS damage, and spell damage.

That being said, the per strike damage is nearly identical (about 1 point of damage different). This means the more frequent ODD strikes are heavily skewing the averages up even if you are getting a huge number of small Khanda hits, as I expected.

After looking at WS fequency and numbers of hits, I think Khanda comes out as the clear winner because of the level correction working against it.

I expect the Khanda fights felt harder because of the slightly higher level that pushed damage down and monster HPs and damage up. The number of Dream Flower casts also indicate twice as many bad pulls during that period, so that probably led to longer resting times because of MP spent and more damage that had to be healed.

Interestingly enough, the number of Blank Gaze casts is almost the same, so either the mob used Cocoon a lot less on the Khanda set or the TP feed was not as bad as expected.

I think the take-home lesson is that the Str and Att aren't giving people substantial damage increases at 99 even if the numbers look very big. You can barely see the effect in this parse before accounting for level-correction, and it might not even be empirically provable after taking into account level-correction, and that's pretty damaging.

After looking at this raw data, I'm more inclined to look at other stats as a way to increase combat efficacy for this one slot. The stats that NA players focus on seem designed for high-damage epeen screenshots to put in their sigs and don't reflect overall effectiveness or usefulness to the party.