She's going to spam Zoltraak whenever Denken's party is trying to heal isn't she?

[u/ciutomorrow]

[u/[deleted]]

Which is a big thing in a fight lmao.

[u/Mirrormn → u/[deleted]]

Yes, for sure, just saying a mana-restricted Frieren would still be no cakewalk.

But the funny thing is, if you treated her as if she had her restricted level of mana, and then you were wrong and it turned out she had more... that's literally the exact combat advantage that she works so hard to achieve. That's why she restricts her mana in the first place.

[u/alexathegibrakiller → u/Mirrormn]

It's not just the combate advantage of not knowing frieren's exact stamina. it's fooling the demons about the expectation of power. The amount of mana a mage has depends on the amount of time spent training, and if you pour in a shit ton of time training, both your stamina and skill should improve, not just the stamina. So, having a large amount of mana also means that the mage probably knows how to utilize it well, which is the scarier part.

As we saw in the past episodes, battles between human mages often come down to a game of rock paper scizzors. For instance úbel has no chance of victory against wirbel, but the feather guy will absolutely wreck wirbel's shit, even though ùbel might be technically stronger than the feather guy. I think this is mainly because of how restrictive human's life spans are, some mages like fern and denken choose to focus on more available and "generic" combat spells like defense magic and attacking spells, and focus on how to most effectively use them and think on the fly on how to beat thier opponent's quirky magic. Other mages seem to focus on developing really strong and really clever magic, like wirbel or land. Strong "combat" mages like fern and denken might be able to beat the latter, if they figure out a way to counter the magic with thier arsenal, or, these "quirky" mages can be beaten in a game of rock paper scissors by a "quirky" mage like themselves.

A person like frieren, however, who has a long lifespan and can choose to focus on both quirky magic and her general battle prowess, has the option to either beat you in the game of rock paper scissors, or just outfight you with "generic" magic. I feel like that's where the mana trickery, and in a way, her quirky brand of spell comes in. She can make her opponent believe that she is less experienced than she is, which might lead them to use their "quirky" magic in a lax way. This is especially important while fighting demons, as so far, we see them focusing on perfecting one specific but very powerful spell for their entire lifetimes.

Let's say, for example, wirbel was a 700 year old demon who has an indomitable binding spell with way fewer restrictions. The moment frieren engages him, she is screwed. But if the demon percieves frieren as less of a threat, and does not use his OP magic to win instantly and spoil the fun, frieren can quickly use her most deadly spells before the demon even has a chance to realize what happened, making her win the fight.

I will agree, now that her name is notorious, some demons and all humans will take her seriously and throw everything they have at her, but I think as we see with aura fight, even despite her herculean accomplishment of defeating the demon king, its still incomprehensible for a demon to consider frieren strong, unless they either figure out that she is supressing her mana, or they know it beforehand from somewhere. The reason is, thats how demons judge their opponents' strength, through mana, and due to their nature, it is wild for them to think that someone can be suppressing their mana that well, due to how their society is structured. So her mana suppression thing will probably still work on like 99% of the demons even despite the fact that she mercced the demon king.

This turned into a whole ass essay lmao, i just really love talking about magic in frieren. it's so freaking fun

[u/Oglark → u/alexathegibrakiller]

Denken used pretty big spells in his fight with Frieren.