One on one fight in a locked room, no retreat no surrender 1 on 1 favors Battle, absolutely.

Ganging is one way to not play that game, but there are others, like:

- If you're a stealth character, choose to only initiate combat if circumstances favor you. Yeah, the guy you catch plagued and out of move on the riverbed might get lucky and still beat you... but he probably won't.

- Attack the Ragers you stack up well against, quaff return/teleport against the ones you don't.

- Make liberal use of the healer. If you lack malediction or command denial ability, this may not always get you a kill, but it can easily yield a situation where your enemy has to hide at the Destructor (or somewhere) to avoid dying for a long while.

- Make liberal use of maledictions that cut HP regen or deal regular HP damage, because Battle is seriously ####ed against those things unless there's a defender or bard very handy, and usually there isn't. We had a guy in Nexus in the midlevels a couple years ago, arial spear warrior I think. He got a poison spear and would charge Battle and spam impale at them, and I mean he would keep impaling even after it worked for no good reason. He died a lot but he killed a lot of Ragers too because what does Battle berserker really have for that? Run to the village and buy a cure poison there, but after a couple ticks of poison and the bleeding sticking around it was just too much.

- See a rager that can't permalag you (and most shouldn't be able to)? Run up to him and bash him. If he's doing badly, keep bashing. If he's not, quaff.