forest enemies have 600-750 defense (the dragon has 500 though, meh), unless you pack zalure you really won't pierce their defense naturally all that well for a bit. Yes even forest foes.
http://azurepso.webs.com/psostatistics.htm
[(ATP - DFP)/5] x 0.9 = Weak/Base
Heavy: Base x 1.89
Sacrifice: Base x 3.32
Vjaya: Base x 5.56
Critical: Result x 1.5
atp = [base atp + shifta] + [weapon + weapon %] 
atp also adds atp from shields, armors, grind, and weapon attack ranges but this is pretty much the simple version of it.
Fomar with max base atp has about 1500 with shifta 30 and red ring and so on and then 950 with excal, said excal with 30% native will make the 950 a 1235 just to show my point some even more.
438 to a bartle who was smacked with zalure 30, 828 with a hard hit, 1455 with a zerk hit. This is w/o factoring in misses or crits.
If the bartle doesn't have zalure applied the results are:
380 with normal, 718 with hard, 1261 with zerk.
Fomar packing a charge vulcan now will total out with 1538 atp. 
On same bartle with zalure 30 applied to it: 222 with normal (666), 421 with hard (1263), 739 with charge (2217). Again factoring in no misses or crits.
bartle without zalure 30 = 168 normal (504), 319 hard (957), 560 with charge (1680)
These numbers are made with max atp ranges being factored in.
Anyway if you take anything from this its that you can see why it is very important to slap foes with zalure. A bartle only has 2334 hp and a Fomar can turn them into swiss cheese with charge mechs a lot faster if zalure is on.
I've been seeing a bunch of low level forces recently since this event started not throwing up zalure on foes and as a result they make the quests a lot harder than it has to be.