Summoning Handbook

[Bloody Initiate]

Meteor Swarm, the typical level 9 damage spell.

Umm...

The Air elementals get cone of cold 3/day. Dice-wise, that's capable of doing 45d6 of damage (over 3 rounds, mind you, and assuming HD is 15)
Meteor Storm does 4 spheres of 2d6+6d6, which deals 32d6 of damage in one spell.
It's a repost from 339, but by summoning a single air elemental and having it cone of cold constantly, you can get more mileage out of your spell compared to, say, Meteor Swarm. Summoning multiple elementals makes this even better, of course.

I'm pretty sure that's what that little note meant.

Did I just read you saying "This lower level spell does more damage than this higher level spell so it's better... assuming I can cast the lower level spell unopposed 3 times."?

I'm not disagreeing with your jist, but why don't you realize that's a shitty argument?

[mishra]

Heh, I'm just explaining the possible reasoning, no argument here.

Although Air elementals are incredibly fast, have perfect maneuverability, and can even takes some hits for you. Even using Summon Monster IX (instead of Meteor Swarm) and summoning 1d4+1 Huge Elementals from SMVII nets you an average of 3 Elementals who can use cone of cold in the same round... and continue to fly around, continuing Cone of Cold-ing two more times, netting a greater profit from that single spell than what Meteor Swarm could have done.

Hopefully that's a better example.

[chaos_redefined]

Yeah.  If you can get 1d4+1 elementals that deal 15d6 damage with a single round's actions, that's (on average) 3.5.  I'm gonna round down to make my maths nicer.  3 elementals, 15d6 damage each.  45d6 damage.  With double-repeat for teh lulz.  (You get the effects this round, next round, and the round after)  This is a minimum for what will happen 75% of the time.  And we're using a 8th level druid spell for it.

Now, it is possible to point out that the spell will have a lower save.  Which means that we get 22.5d6 more often than we'd like.  However, this is made up for by multiple factors:
1) The triple repeat, which can only be avoided by taking out all of the elementals.  If they manage to only take out one of them, they still take 15d6 next round if they make all saves, totalling 37.5d6.  Which is still more than meteor swarm.
2) The leftover bodies.  3 Huge elementals will be clogging up the area.  Even without Augment Summoning and the like, this gives over 500 hit points.  Additionally, each elemental fills up a 3x3 area, meaning 27 squares that opponents can't move through.