duvessa wrote:TheMeInTeam wrote: it's mostly a go-to for stabbers against a wide swath of randomly super-high MR or magic-immune monsters.
Then the spell is already ruined, because monster HD closely corresponds to monster MR. There really aren't many monsters with low HD but high MR, and vice versa
That's actually not true, there's a pretty odd set of mismatches between MR and HD for a fair amount of the game, having just played through a stabber with both spells starting from early in the game, there was no rhyme or reason why one thing should be hard to confuse, but easy to CT, but there's quite a large number of such creatures, a significant portion of which are reasonably threatening, it's everything from death yaks, to Naga warriors/Nagaraja, to Rakasha, to spriggan druids/air mages, to point out a a few ones I remember off hand.
Even among creatures of similar types with similar HD, the MR can vary pretty widely, take Reapers, Tier 2 demon, 14 HD, 100 MR vs Blizzard demons, Tier 2 demon, 12 HD, 140 MR, or Balrug, Tier 2 demon, 14 HD, 160 MR..
To make it even weirder, nether HD nor MR is reasonably related to something's actual *danger* level
I'm not saying it should be that way, but it is so.
Additionally I found myself using CT over Confuse when things were close to melee range, even when the chances were slightly in favor of Confuse, because my dagger swung faster than my confuse could be cast for multiple attempts, so when there was a decent failure chance (say over 50% or so) casting CT once and swinging my dagger of speed a bunch of times was preferable to casting confuse several times, even if the CT chances were say 30% to Confuse's 40%, ignoring the MP difference (because it was mostly irrelevant)
Also CT can be cast when the thing is out of LOS which makes it more useful than it would appear at first glance.
That doesn't even mention things which are either magic-immune, or just REALLY hard to confuse, that it's possible, however difficult, to land CT on (I was CT'ing liches and titans, because I had a fast enough swing that 11% was a reasonable success chance, and Confuse wasn't even an option)
I'm not saying it's a *good* mechanic, at all, it's kind of horribly communicated, and weird, but there's no arguing that there's a healthy set of creatures who you are better off using CT on than Confuse if your objective is to get them confused so you can stab them.
The percentage of critters who it was better for me to use CT on rather than confuse was something like 30% or so all the way through the depths/vaults.