D&D 5E (2014) 9th level spells compared by equivalent lower level spell value

[Frankie1969]

Wait. Are you saying your evil overlords don't deliver scenery-chewing monologues and demands before unleashing their "unstoppable" hordes?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Wait. Are you saying your evil overlords don't deliver scenery-chewing monologues and demands before unleashing their "unstoppable" hordes?

I think by the time you can cast Meteor Swarm the evil overlords' "unstoppable" hordes tend to be of the kind where the only way to stop them is to kill the evil overlord and/or closing his gate/blow up his machine/break his mind control of the populace or the like, so it's generally more about getting past the horde (by teleporting or plane shifting or whatever) than blowing up a small portion of it which will be replaced shortly.

The stoppable-by-just-killing-them hordes tend to peter out in the mid-teens, in my experience! YMMV!

I'm sure that in D&D history there have been many occasions where a glorious victory was achieved by a player who Meteor Swarm'd a lot of monsters the DM had jam-packed into an area (presumably either to enable this, or because the DM forgot MS existed), but in my experience it's usually used to try and do solid damage for more like 3-5 big monsters than glorious hordes with exactly the high HP to actually die from it. Unfortunately fire resistance is pretty common at those levels, though specific bludgeoning resistance (rather than resisting "normal weapons", which this is not) is rare, which combined with strong saves, typically brings the damage down a fair bit.