How does Nekhaka help a ruler?

So you’re a ruler and you wield the sceptre Nekhaha, which was designed to make ruling easier. You have a d12 artifact die on all Manipulation and Insight rolls, which is amazing. But by the evening, when your courtiers are carousing and many plans will be either hatched or set into action, you have a cumulative -3 to Agility and Wits. OK, the d12 on Insight counter-balances the loss of Wits, and might even be a good thing because you can push rolls knowing that you’re not going to injure yourself because you’ve probably only got one base die left. But the penalty to Agility is just crippling. To make it to the end of the day without being Broken or having a healer on hand, you need at least 4 in both Agility and Wits, which you’re going to have to burn.

"Don’t wield Nekhaka all the time", I hear you say. OK, but (a) if you don’t wield it, you’re not helping your people build stuff in your stronghold, and (b) you want a boost to Insight pretty much all the time if you want to make sure you spot and resist other people’s dastardly plans.

"The sceptre only drains power when the wielder uses it": better, and let’s assume that nobody’s building anything in the stronghold. That still enables a side-channel attack, though: if the ruler is unusually clumsy, that means that they and/or someone else was up to something nefarious, because a Manipulation or Insight roll happened.

Compare this to the drawbacks of the other ancient elf items:

• Viridia/Gall-Eye makes you bloodthirsty and slightly eats your stuff
• Iridne doesn’t like killing
• Stanengist doesn’t like spells

Nekhaka’s drawback seems disproportionate to me.