Winter's Frost  

If you're wondering why exactly they did the changes they did to the spells in the most recent patch, it was to balance out the damage per mana that each spell did. I'm pretty sure that before this had an attrocious mana cost on top of the previous 1550 damage, but with the new patch, it's got a fairly decent amount of damage still (1357 on regulars, about 1830 on criticals) *EDIT* This was before they made all criticals a straight double damage. This should be 2714 now critical I believe. *DOUBLE EDIT* With my new IDIV this averages about 1500 damage a nuke, which is VERY good for the mana cost in my opinion.

Anyways, Summer's Flame, although it does 1600 damage now and about the same cast time (Summer's Flame is .1 faster) has a damage per mana ratio of 4.05 approximately. This spell raises the damage up to 4.45 damage per mana ratio (4.448 if you're really technical) which overall accounts for better output in a long fight even though the theoretical unadjusted DPS for Summer's Flame is significantly higher (182) than this (153).

Bottom line, the changes balanced out some of the spells really nicely. I've also noticed that Summer's Flame tends to resist a lot more despite the fact that both spells have a resist check of (0), so having an ice nuke to handle anything nicely that's not on Velious is pretty good. I give this spell an A- for damage per mana and all around usability at this level.

Edited, Mon Jul 18 10:04:42 2005

Think I picked up this spell on sheer luck first time I had seen it for sale for about a year. This is truely an amazing spell. What makes it so great aside from its low mana cost is you can chain nuke since it refreshes almost instantly. With a decent mana pool you can easily and quickly knock off 10K hp's on a mob in no time.