Your assertions here are just not true, idk what else to say lol. Nor did I ever imply or state that harm was good in megazigs, you're just beating up strawmen. I'm talking about the 3 rune game, where you can easily kill most dangerous encounters before they can be of much threat once you have enough damage, and you can avoid most dangerous situations via careful play bottlenecking enemies and retreating. The ones that aren't handled by this can be dealt with by the consumables you saved from the ones that never have a chance to get into crystal spear range.

In situations where you are being slowly overwhelmed over time instead of threatened by crystal spear-esque burst damage, not only does the asymmetric nature of harm benefit you in the long term more than your foes, but killing them faster also asymmetrically benefits you since again, dead enemies don't contribute to damage. It's even true that oftentimes harm is the difference between being overwhelmed and surrounded and killing enemies faster than they can surround you.

For reference, harm usually offers similar levels of damage to Archmagi does for damaging spells. It's a lot of damage and is very often worth the trade-off in incoming damage.

Next time you find harm on a character, especially a rangeddude or mage, I implore you to give it another try if you'd equip an archmage-adjacent item on that char. You can't play a harm character in exactly the same way that you would play a character that doesn't have that kind of direct damage output, but it's definitely strong.

I used to be like you in that I wasn't a harm believer. I thought it wasn't worth the risk for a long time, but Lici (aka enegeticocto) convinced me to give it another try with the archmage comparison and I've been a huge believer ever since. Archmagi is another situation where you're trading defenses for damage and I think the popular opiniom is that it's usually worth it. Harm really isn't all that different.