Normal Damage and Sacred Arts Attack

[Jasspur]

Anyone know if any stats effect normal damage, or does strength only effect cutting through defense (atk stat)? I would also like to know if anyone has experimented with sacred arts attack vs sacred arts damage? I would assume it cuts defense, but it seems like sacred arts already do that.

[さまよう侍]

ATK affect your normal weapon attack and sword art. STR, AGI, DEX further affect your sword art skill damage; you can see the multiplier when you select the sword art. STR do also affect base ATK, AGI affect evasion and DEX affect accuracy.
As for Sacret Art damage, you need to raise your Sacret Art level and use any equipment that has Sacret Art Damage/Potency in description box. I don't remember exact wording but you can check on those with Detail screen enable. Nice thing about Sacret Art is it ignore accuracy check.

[Velmoria]

It's Damage stats (a.k.a Skill Power) that actually affect base damage, both sword skill and normal attack.
ATK stats is more like "penetration power" against enemy DEF. It doesn't actually increase damage and only important when against higher level enemy. Lower level enemy will always take full damage and cannot evade no matter how low ACC a character is.