Combat magic.

I've been rereading the series (again) and in the first book there's several mentions of gadrials "combats magic". Haven't gone through the other books yet but I don't remember any detail about just what combat magic is. So I'm assuming it's similar to what there weapons can do.

But what I'm wondering is if we can expect to see magisters skilled in combat magic heading towards the front. Now I still don't see how arcana can push through a well defended sharonian portal but the magisters ability to be portable artillery could be a nasty surprise.

We have seen a few combat mages in action, such as the one who cast the glamour covering the cavalry charge against the fort. I expect that many many mages are headed towards the front, but we haven’t seen most of them yet, because of the distances involved. We don’t know how many there are, or what they can do.

Lots of them may be support rather than frontline, e.g. the people recharging accumulator crystals.

There are probably people who can do really vast and impressive combat spells, but we don’t know how many people or how much preparation is involved in the sort of spells that were forbidden after the Portal Wars.