Calm Emotions or Color Spray

[Atalius]

Having a tough time choosing between these two spells. Both have the incapacitate trait so will require heightening to the highest level ideally to do there thing, or second highest spell slot. Which one of these two spells is generally better? I'm having a real difficult time deciding.

[HumbleGamer]

Calm emotions is way better imo.
Even a little op.

Probably not the best deal because of compositions,

A)
- composition
- cast spell

Or

B)
- composition
- attack
- sustain spell

If you are on B and want go cast a spell, you have to decide between forgo a composition or the sustain spell action.

but it is alwas an extra possibility ( given the fact bard has composition ).

[BellyBeard]

I agree calm emotions is better overall. Better range, better AoE pattern of burst instead of cone, on a fail it takes the enemy out of the fight, and you can sustain the attack penalty on successful save instead of it only lasting 1 round. The advantage for color spray is that on a failed save it affects them for a minute without sustaining, while you have to spend an action every round on calm emotions. Of course if it's only one or two creatures color spray would also be preferable, since your party will want to direct hostile actions against them if they have no other targets and potentially taking away an action and blinding for a round (which possibly means they have to seek, losing more actions) is a much better penalty than -1 attack.