[General Issue] Confusion's alliance-switching is a bad mechanic, made worse by 1.05

[thelee]

Confusion causes party members and enemies to actually switch alliance for purposes of targeting during its effect.

 

I can understand why this is the case for Charm/Dominate (this is how charm/dominate were implemented in IE).

 

But I still can't understand why it happens for Confusion. This is unprecedented in the spirit of IE games and while I have no problem with breaking from the IE tradition where it makes sense, implementing Confusion with an alliance-switching mechanic results in unintuitive and perceptually buggy behavior:

• It makes the Prayer Against Bewilderment priest spell largely useless after-the-fact since it won't target confused allies (they are not treated as allies).
• It makes Suppress Affliction and similar spells pointless, because they are friendly-only and won't target confused allies (since they are treated as allies).
• With more and more abilities switching over to Foe-only, a spellcaster-heavy party is becoming increasingly *less* effective against confused enemies, because very few spells now target them.
• There are very bad and unintuitive interactions with many other abilities (abilities that have jump effects or abilities with area of effects such as Carnage). No one intuitively confuses an enemy thinking that all their party buffs will now strengthen these enemies.

And even if the alliance-switching makes sense for Charm/Dominate, it doesn't make sense that Prayer Against Treachery has a "reduce duration" effect noted on it when there's no way to apply it to your party members after they've been charmed/dominated (if it works as intended).

 

This has been a general issue since day 1, but it has gotten worse in 1.05 as more spells have switched to Foe-only, which ironically means confused enemies negate an increasing amount of your party's potential.

 

Ideally it seems like of targetting purposes, instead of a check like:

if (spell_type == FOE_ONLY && target.alliance != caster.alliance) {
 /* ... */
}

it should be:

if (spell_type == FOE_ONLY && target.alliance != caster.alliance && !target.is_confused) {
  /* now foe-only spells do not target confused allies */
}

Edited May 12, 2015 by thelee

[Zwiebelchen]

You are basicly assuming things here.

Confused enemies aren't friendly. They are neutral. It's just the circle that appears green because neutral NPCs are green aswell (instead of blue like in the IE games. IE mod fixes this, fortunately). All the friend-only effects do not apply to confused enemies. However, foe-only effects do not apply either.

 

However, you are right about the "Prayer against" spells. Obviously, they don't target neutrals.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[thelee]

OK, I assumed like 10% of my point based on the rest of my experiences, sorry.

 

The

You are basicly assuming things here.

remark is over the top since the rest of the post are still relevant and based on actual in-game experience.

 

It's not alliance-switching then, but the alliance-changing nonetheless seriously brikes foe-only and yellow-circle spells (in addition to a few friend-only spells which intuitively should work on confused allies).

Edited May 12, 2015 by thelee