It looks like monster magical attacks do decent damage, but anything physical seems to do very little damage.
Do monsters use a different physical damage formulae? Im looking at jenova-birth in the proud clod editor, and the damage isnt matching up with what its doing in game. It's level 25 with a strength of 38 which gives it a base damage of about 96. All of its attacks are listed as having an attack strength of 48, so they should all do 48/16 * 96 = 288 damage or so.
But tail laser only does about 110 damage or so to my characters, and my DEF can't reduce it by more than 50%. Its not a range attack, and its listed as a "starts as multiple" attack so it shouldnt suffer any damage penalties for attacking more than one character at once. Either proud clod isnt showing the correct stats, or there are some other modifiers in play that its not showing.
The only way those numbes make sense would be if Jenova-birth uses it's "back attack" value of 16 instead of its strength value of 38, but that doesnt make sense because its not a back attack fight....
Edit : Interestingly, Jenova-birth's standard laser attack does about 175 damage to characters in the front row and half that to characters in the backrow, even though it is NOT listed as a short range attack and should not be affected by the row modifiers...the tail laser attack also suffers a half damage penalty vs characters in the back row, and it does suffer the 1/3rd damage penalty you get when you linked an all materia to single target magic materia. But the attack is flagged as "start as multiple" so it shouldnt be getting a damage penalty for that...