I've had the same issue with flame wave stopping doing any damage mid game/battle.  Something is broken with this update, worked fine before if a little OP.

Derek - I was playing a game this weekend where I tried to use Flamewave & didn't see any damage.  I actually had 3 or 4 champions + Sov cast it and nothing happened.  The flames were displayed but no damage was done.  I keep all my saves, so I'll find one & send it in when I get home tonite. 

This isn't a quest, I didn't save at that point, but if you attack the Slag (and he's supposed to be very vulnerable to fire damage) you'll see what we mean.

I had 3 champions quay up Flamewave & then started casting Haste to speed up the process, much to my chagrin.  He died by the sword very nicely.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16706254/Jim_912_4_29.EleSav

 I have a latter saved game where I have Blizzard, but that spell worked just fine.

As an aside, you can see I'm deep into a massive game on a large map (level=challenging), but I've had zero crashes and absolutely no slow downs.

I'm running on a new machine (Acer Predator w/Win7-64, i7-2600, 8GB DDR3, GeForce GT530 2GB) that hasn't had time to get clogged up with all those "death of a thousand cuts" add-on programs, but that's pretty impressive when I read about problems others are having.

Games a blast - just need to beef up the AI (and monsters) & make it a little more threatening.  Love the new Quests.  I actually thought a couple of those AI cities were going to be a challenge they had so many defenders.  Still not seeing AI Sov's or Champions really use magic.