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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 1243196" data-attributes="member: 1465">What? Polar Ray is an 8th level spells, which is already 2 levels more than Harm and therefore there only few metamagic feats you can apply to it. The ones that increase damage are Empower (+2) and Maximize (+3) which you cannot use at all.The no save is the only advantage, but OTOH there's the ranged attack which gives you one shot, if you miss the effect is zero. Harm requires a touch attack, if you miss you have one or more retries in the next round, and successful save only halves the damage.Harm is definitely a winner in the damage, 10/level against d6/level which on the average is about 3 times.The damage type is also better because there's no energy resistance which can help you, altho you can't target undead.You can score a critical with Harm also.Perhaps Polar Ray is great at epic levels, then why is it in the core PHB? I want to point out that a maximized Polay Ray would be 11th level and would deal at 25th level 25x6=150 which is exactly what Harm does at 15th level and by being a 6th level spell only.IMHO the only thing that really capped Harm was that it could not kill a thing, but in 3.5 that works only if the target wins the save.</blockquote>