Does blinding an enemy really blind them?

[WizardHawk]

I have the smoke bombs which if you hit too close to yourself almost completely makes your screen go black, and yet when you hit the enemy with them they still head right for you and seem to hit you with normal rates no matter what. Same goes for tossing dirt. It could be that the 'miss' rate goes up and/or their percentage of damage is going down and I just haven't noticed it, but it really doesn't seem to have any kind of significant impact in any of the battles I've been in.