No one but TMNS has accused me of being an elite player, but I have had a lot of PK success with various combos - so maybe that will give me the street cred to say the following:

1. I don't see how anyone that's played an ABS invoker, evil assassin, or maybe even a temperance paladin could call a Rager overpowered. Whoever thinks Ragers are OP should play one of these classes - if you have some sense of sportsmanship and/or a desire for challenge, eventually you'll stop hunting Ragers.

2. I think you (eskelian) are seriously overestimating the time involved with ABS and underestimating the time involved with playing a rager. Where prep time takes a serious uptick is for melée classes (non assassins because they have assassinate/trance) stocking up on one shot non-buyable preps. That is almost not worth it for me. But ABS invokers, at least, require relatively minimal boring time getting preps. As for RBWs, there is PLENTY of 15 min interval downtime - only your downtime will be hiding somewhere watching your HP come close to zero from bleeding or immolation or plague or whatever hoping you manage to survive. Maybe that's fun time for you I don't know - but if it is I would imagine getting barrier would be fun time for you, too.

3. The "ragers are OP" post that connected the most to me was Scrimbul's comment that "dying is not a downside for the types of players that want to play RBWs for their PK win potential.". That makes sense for people like Batman who (according to him) couldn't get 60ish PKs unless he were playing a RBW - I can see for players like that who are overjoyed with a 60/80 win/loss ratio would be overjoyed at 60 wins and not care about the 80 losses - they probably don't have much downtime other than ghost time, either, since they aren't barely surviving much - they're just condying at 200 hours. I can see how RBWs are OP from that perspective, but you can't balance RBWs to that perspective because to everyone else in the game, they're a slightly dangerous character more likely to die than to PK you. Basically I don't think you should balance the game for the lowest rung in terms of player ambition and skillset.

4. Keep in mind you are not the only voice on why Ragers are OP - there is a lot of white noise on the issue and your "point" may be shared only by you. My sense is that your point doesn't have anything to do with Ragers and has more to do with "gathering prep downtime." As I mentioned above, I think you are overestimating this time wrt ABS. WRT single shot preps for non-assassin/ranger melée types, I think the only non buyable ones are shield and aura. I'm not sure where the balance falls on making those reductions freely available. At least as it is now you don't need a warrior with shield/aura to compete ... But if they were buyable I think I'd have to chug them down before every fight.

Anyway, those are my thoughts re: the discussion on Dios albeit not strictly to your posts in particular.