Quote Originally Posted by Ryllharu View Post
Zoltraak? Mana depletion wins the encounter. The Barrier will not break, you just won't be able to produce them anymore and one will slip through.
I still think Bill's point is interesting. There could be an individual limit to how much energy, how many watts, a magician can pump into their shield. This would also mean that the smaller the shield, the more energy it receives and thus the more powerful zoltraak it can withstand, since the total energy per second is not divided by many shield elements. However, if the zoltraak, or exceedingly rapidly repeated zoltraaks, is still more powerful (has more joules) than the defending magician can pump into the shield per second, no matter how vast the magician's remaining mana pool (how many kWh of mana they have left), it doesn't matter. The shield will break and the magician will take damage, despite having even plenty of mana remaining. Of course I'd assume mana control and other forms of training would widen the bandwidth through which a magician can pump mana into the shield.

Furthermore, I could also imagine the shield itself could have variation between magicians. One magician could perhaps store enough mana in the shield to block 10kJ attack, one could maintain a shield strong enough to block 20kJ. Frieren probably can block 100kJ... But if the magician tries to pump more than that into the shield, they might lose control. Not that it would necessarily be an issue since simply maintaining the shield eats energy, meaning mana from the shield is dissipating into the atmosphere continuously, so having too "thick" a shield would be a suicide, unless you expect the fight to last a single second.