Stealth your entire party outside NPC view, then send one party member into combat. From this point on, all NPC's are frozen in time as long as you don't enter their view with the remaining (out-of-combat) party members. You can then in-turn have each remaining party member enter combat exactly how they please.
Good find. There’s another one I discovered way back where you can send a familiar over to the Spectator and use it to kill all the drow statues without awakening the thing. I mentioned it on Steam suggestions, so no idea if they fixed in later patches – I can’t bring myself to play through this game again until release.
Yeah, I wouldn’t actively try to cheese the system, but playing the Spectator fight the fair way didn’t seem to be adding up. So I took the party way outside the fight range and called up the crow familiar to see if I could use it to trigger the Spectator to surface. This was months back, and the last time I played, so I can’t remember why his buried condition was causing so much hassle.
But then accidentally I discovered the crow doesn’t trigger anything and can/could just kill every statue unimpeded.
It doesn’t feel ‘strategic’ to trick an unthinking AI. If you’ve found another exploit, I’d say you should use the official reporting mechanism to let them know, because now that you’ve mentioned it, I personally can’t forget it. Hence there’s always the temptation, if a fight is going nowhere for too long, to just quick-win with a known cheese tactic to move things along. Much more interesting if the AI surprises you with some kind of intelligent adjustment to your attempted slyness.
