Questions about calm spells.

[Paul Bunyom]

Do calming spells make it easier to sneak behind an enemy to do a stealth kill, and would a person under calm react to you killing someone? Also, would enemies notice if you cast a calm spell on someone else, what do they do when they "wake up"? Is this a good spell for a sneaky character, who wants to utilize sneak multipliers? I really want to get the spell, but I don't know if it'd be useful to me.

[Bomb Bloke]

A calmed character is as easy to stealth-attack as a normally-neutral character.

Enemies who would normally attack you will continue to do so when the spell wears off "naturally". I'm not sure what happens if you attack their friends in the meantime.

The strongest version, Harmony, can even make people forget that they caught you pickpocketing them - meaning you can have another go every time you cast it.

The main problem is that the spells only work on enemies of up to a certain level. You can increase that level via perks (or by getting higher classes of the spell), but ultimately there's a limit.

[istvan_v]

Yes, you can use sneak attacks on calmed enemies if you are hidden, and others that are under the effect of the spell will not care. If you have the quiet casting perk, then no one will care about you casting the spell either, otherwise they can be alerted by the noise. When the spell times out, the enemy you used it on will not remember seeing you if you are hidden by that time, but I am not entirely sure about this.

To significantly increase the level cap of the spells, you can also use dual casting (2.2x higher level), or fortify illusion potions if your character is good at alchemy, these bonuses stack with those from the perks.

[Eternie]

Personally I think the Calm / frenzy spells are THE most useless spells as most are restricted by level of the npcs they are aimed at. Which other spell school has such ridiculous restrictions

Unless you start as a mage and focus just on upping your spells and perks they won't have any effect on all NPC's who level with you like bandits etc.

Well apart from Clairvoyance, Courage, Rally, Muffle and Invisiblity the remainder all have Level restrictions. So they work on general peasants, but not guards

[istvan_v]

Most skills do not remain very useful at higher levels without building them, and illusion is not an exception. But the expert level Pacify spell with the relevant perks does work up to level 28, and dual casting increases that to 61. Most enemies in the game are below that level. Actually, it should be higher than 28 based on the perks (20 base level + 8 Hypnotic Gaze + 8/10 Animage/Kindred Mage), it may be a bug that the game displays only 28.