1) Neuro as an opener is mostly never a bad idea, mostly because the upsides to landing it (especially a powerful one that freezes someone) are so beneficial. It's your equivalent of the sleep spell, in a lot of ways.
2) I speak a little hasty, if you don't have Bewildering Jolt edge mental jolt is somewhat useless against ragers. BUT! With the edge, it's very useful. You want the confuse affect mostly. The -int is super useful for some things (landing better affects on your neuros, nuking STSF chars, etc) but it's the complete fuckery of their ability to move around that we're after with our tactics against ragers.
3) Prepping with malleability + aura + shield isn't really asking too much of you. You can buy aura in at least 1 super easy to get to place (and several other places). That's all you're going to need for the tactics I described. 2 class spells + 1 store bought item.
4) RE: Having them wait for you to return...read my post below starting with PROTIP. Your goal is to get them as far from the village as possible. If you do that, you can easily recall/heal catch them before they can escape.
5) If you had a ton of pimp gear which would give you over 1000hp + ABS, you wouldn't need to hit-n-run. But you don't have pimp gear. So you gotta make do with what you got.
6) Honestly, the smartest tactic IMHO would be to run around duo and just ambush villagers as they fought other people or tough mobs. That's the tried and true way to get a leg up on them.
7) Duergar dagger defender has a counter to every thing you do, and has the ability to completely neutralize you with maledictions (making you drop your staff) and bleeding (ruining regen and if accelerated/meta quickened you'll take huge damage).
8) Accelerate can put the target to sleep when their moves drop to 0 (or below). Remember them when using accelerate on yourself, but there are also many ways you can use it as an offensive spell and debilitate a villager.
9) Think about using other outside-the-box tactics if you think I'm nuts and my shit won't work. Gill growth. Buoyancy. Using the mass spells to bypass spellbane, etc.
