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Okay, let me give this a try.

'jabbed for' suggests that the point itself had intent.  'jabbed towards' or 'jabbed at' woud avoid this.

Good image, though 'jumble' is a mild word.  'tangle' might be better, but I suggest a session with Mister Thesaurus.

You could drop 'looking' and 'like', speeding the flow a bit.

'opposed each other, holding fast'?

So they are using linear tactics, never having had Roman Legions whose movements within their line would break the opposing line?  (We still don't know just how they did it.)

This is in the past tense, but 'thrust' is present tense.

You don't need 'both'.

Instead of specifying 'good guys', why not just name that side and let the reader make the usual assumption: that until further notice, the protagonist(s) are the good guys?

The first comma suggests a parenthetical-effect match with the second comma.  Since that's not the structure, I suggest dropping the first comma.  The second is the more necessary, and provides a more balanced break of the sentence.  Everything after the comma modifies not the immediately preceeding predicate but the more remote subect of the sentence, 'the shields'.

Instead of 'in front of', 'before'.  Its length matches 'above', creating symmetrical brevity around the conjunction.

'bad guys'=>'Their opponents, {name},'

'other fighter' == 'fallen fighter'?  Otherwise I might thing that the other fighter is the enemy who struck the blow.

'keeping him protected'=>'protecting'.

What shield?

The fallen priest's magical bracer?  Charmed bracer?  The magic of the fallen priest's bracer?

In the priest's eyes?  Why is Tazar looking away from the threat?  Doesn't he know better?  I suggest leaving Tazar's PoV for a couple of paragraphs to cover this, and letting him concentrate on the battle.

This asserts a negative with an oblique expression.  'The City called this a game.  It was battle, staking Tos G'Swa's future on wooden weapons wielded.'  Okay, that last bit is frumpery.

'struck the head of the enemy soldier taunting Tazar.  The man's head flew back and his body followed, to the ground.' ?

'The oversized lance flew across the fighting lines and struck ... .  His head flew back ...' ?

'was willing'=>'was ready'?

'keeping the shield wall from being shoved off their feet' => 'holding the shield wall together on its feet'?

The tip had a blunt tip, or the spear's tip was blunt and wide, with hooks?  In which case it's not really a spear.  Not exactly a halberd either, but hooked weapons were used to pull down mounted fighters.  A paging tour of Wikipedia, starting perhaps with 'halberd', should turn up some suitable words.

That is what made {x} the bad guys.

'A muffled, mocking laugh made Tazar ...'

They were getting nowhere?

Exchange 'He' and 'Tazar'.

Can you remove the question, and adjust the second sentence to match?

Try without 'of them'.  Instead of 'Tazar waited ...', try 'When all five ... Tazar ...'

Have you defined 'heater shield'?  You use it more than once, so I assume it's not a typo.

'The' bad guy?  Which one?  There are a lot of them.  You mean the taunter, the loudmouth?

Why hyphenate 'bad-guy'?

You don't need the first phrase.

'other tall men followed suit'=>'four tall fighters pushed/pressed forward/ with Tazar'?

'knocking down ... armored soldiers'=>toppling ((seven or eight)) armored enemies out of their line', and you can drop the simile.

'Tazar didn't care'=>'it didn't matter'.

Try 'be' instead of 'make'.  It's a little shorter, but also a little less vivid.

'The enemy shield wall was falling'?

Overall, the description, flow, and logic are good and feel true to linear tactics as I understand them.

Does the character have to choose the moment (Katerin's display) or can the moment choose the character (an unexpected assailant in battle)?

For me, a use of power gains strength by its immediate connection to action, plot, and character.  It loses strength if it is scene-setting or milieu

Good luck on the test.  Remember the little stuff and stay 5 mph below all the speed limits.

Yes, the power budget is about battery life.  I'm using C cells.  Depending on how fast you draw the current and where your low voltage cutoff is, good alkaline C's can give you between two and ten amp-hours.  My low-voltage cutoff is about 3.6 volts for four or 0.9 volts per cell.  With very low current, I'm on the longest curve, so I'm hoping for 7.7 amp-hours.  When it's off-hook or flashing it will draw more current, so I need a little margin.  If I figure 7.5 amp-hours and 52560 hours.  Divide 7.4 amp-hours by 52560 hours and you get 0.000136 amps, or 136 microamps.  Might as well call it 135.

The most important operations in High School Algebra are adding zero and multiplying by one.

Polish at this level first.  Well, not so much polish as smooth out.  If you don't you won't see clearly what you're chom#pping.

I need sleep now.

I'll have to go over it in detail.  There are places where I think you may have cut good stuff, and others where I think you need to close up seams.

I have no better suggestion than to beg or borrow (do not steal!) a copy of the pre-Bowdlerized (i.e. 1970's) Strunk & White Elements of Style.  There are people who look down on it as being too simple.  Well, maybe they were born on Olympus.  Most of us need to get out of the sea onto dry land.

Time and deliberate practice, which is why I suggested honing your skills on one section over time.

The key is in the sentence construction.  You can get it all in there, but you need to keep the main topic and the elaborations in their proper relationship.  It also helps if you can keep the word count down.  To quote Will Strunk, "...  that every word tell."

There are two levels of imagery here.  One is, to abuse a quote from Gilbert and Sullivan, corroborative detail meant to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and uninteresting plot.  Now, your plot is neither bald nor uninteresting, but the point is that this is detail meant to make the touch startling, the stroke deadly, the remark cutting.

The other level (and two is really too simple) is the painting of the scene.  It comes down, I suppose, to the idea that a paragraph has a topic.  If the topic is action, the description is about that action.  If it's a character, the description enhances the character.  But if the topic is the setting, then the description is about the setting.

I would not support either generalization.  But in the example in question, the `weaker' description serves as a prelude to the stronger, and you progress from the lesser marvel to the greater, ending on the amazement.  The composer puts the greatest drama in the last part of the symphony; the thriller has the highest tension in the climax, which is much nearer the end than the beginning.

Assuming that you want to present both A and B, if A is the stronger and you present it first, presenting the weaker B second drains the energy from the experience.

Also, the topic of the female elves leads right to the topic of the next paragraph.  That connectedness is a very, very important part of communicating, whether in writing an essay, or a story scene, or even a computer program, which must be understood by humans as well as the computer.

The problem is that explicitly casting things in the PoV character's frame of experience is weak.  It's showing how the rabbit gets into the top hat.  There are times when you want to follow the PoV character's thoughts explicitly, for instance, when he is putting together facts that neither he nor the reader correctly interpreted.  But otherwise you need to help us see things as the PoV character sees them, or as someone would see them looking over his shoulder.

The imagery is a little heavy, yes, but I think the real problem is the simple amount of grammar placed between the core of the sentence subject and the core of the predicate.  It's eased somewhat if you get the commas in the right place, setting the 'aided by ...' off semi-parenthetically.  The sentence can bear the weight of the 'aided by' better after the verb and its immediate modifier and before the 'issuing ... and using ...' participles which--note carefully--actually are modifiers on 'The old mage' and not on the verbs.  Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but moving the past-participle 'aided by' modifier in front of them brings subject and verb-of-the-main-clause closer.

At one time, this sort of exposition dump was standard in world-building (or tech-building), but as the craft improved it has become worse than low-rent.  In the meantime, it does have one use--as sarcasm on the part of the speaker.  If there's exposition, it has to be conveyed more subtlely.  In the case of a ceremony that's simply part of the milieu, there's no reason that you can't simply state it as the narrator and be done with it.

I don't know about staggering numbers, but Bonnie Milani got a review that many writers would trade their families for AND a letter of praise from Orson Scott Card--both for Home World.

The reason that I might interrupt the flow of the song is to record your protagonist's changing impressions of it.  That doesn't mean that you have to say that they are his impressions; if you have a close PoV your reader will impute the reaction to your PoV character, consciously or un-.   (Oh yeah, Orson Scott Card's Character and Viewpoint).

  Fair point.  On how many occasions might Olstas have had this explained to him?  I've missed a few chapters, so I don't know, but you might work a little reminder into the scene somewhere.

So I must apologize for not following the story closely enough in the earlier chapters.

A semicolon is a longer stop than a comma, but a shorter stop than a period.  It can separate two independent clauses just as a period does, but it implies a shorter stop and a closer relationship.  It is also sometimes used to separate list elements if the elements are long and complex.  It is used in math as a list separator to imply a line break.  (There are functions that are written with variable numbers of arguments on multiple lines, most notable the Gaussian hypergeometric.  There are also functions written by convention with arguments in a pile, notably "N choose K" and "Highest Common Factor".)

Colons are also used to introduce a phrase or clause that 'amplifies'--makes more specific or clear--what comes just before.  In general, the sentence must end immediately afterward.

Hope this helps.

Okay.  I'm delayed in it; I just Kindle-read the time-travel story celebrated in Sol's link and I did a long review for Jube and have now to reply to his reply.

Something I would find helpful, maybe in this spirit, maybe against it: Once I have reviewed a chapter of a work, putting new updates to that work in a prominent place.  This way I don't have to explicitly declare a connection and get evern poem, essay, and short story when I am following and reviewing a novel.

What about starting a forum or thread with advice for newcomers?  The first few articles should be carefully composed and maybe subjected to a review process for improvement.

Tried to post this yestre'en, but the site must have been etherized upon the table ...

Okay, here's what's up with Erevain.  This guy has to have a reason for his tinfoil hat.  There has to be a backstory and it has to unfold, with the hat, in a scene that's a small drama in itself.  A better or more experienced writer wouldn't have to learn on the job.

I've taken a step,closer, I think.  I need to look at my write-up after some good rest.

Don't do popups.  They turn a lot of people off.  Put a new member link in the sidebar, and keep it at the top of the sidebar and higlighted until it's read.  Then let it fall to the bottom.

Reducing the illustration size and packing more entries into less space is very worth a try, I think.  Higlighting a new member's work and keeping it at the top of the list until it gets all its bonus reviews or gets very old might help too.  (Algorithms are coming to me now.)

New member, first five works (or chapters) published, first three reviews on each => bonus, but a member is only eligible for three bonuses on a given new member.  (No hogging.)

More generally, a small bonus anytime a member reviews a writer not previously reviewed by that member.  Or maybe not so small.  Double points on small works tapering to thirty percent on larger ones.  The algebra is manageable.  (A 0.4 point review goes to 0.8.  A 2.6 point review goes to 3.38 or a little less.)  (Restrict to recent postings?)

In your review reply, you wrote that everybody needs a hobby.