jaelis
Oh this is where the title goes?
To be pedantic, depending on how your particular group counts diagonals, a single fireball could hit around 44 creatures which could mean as much 352d6 damage total if there is a creature in every square of the area of effect and they all fail their save. Obviously an unlikely situation, but possible.
Your results may vary depending how you determine circles on a grid.
Certainly, but Syntallab's argument seems to be that it is reasonable to compare the single-target damage of fireball to the multiple-target damage of other spells. I'm simply trying to point out that if you use that approach, sword burst is hardly the only problem.