El Zoido

It's actually in the options since 1.04, afaik. Look for the "Graphics Quality" slider and move it entirely to the left. I'm not sure if that will fix your problem, though.

My advice is to play now. 1.06 is probably another month away and such lists make the state the game is in look much worse than it really is. Most gamebreking issues are fixed and the few potential gamebreakers that are still in seem to be relatively rare or specific. If you want to make sure, read about certain issues in advance and try to avoid them (e.g. the Noonfrost issue can be avoided entirely and is anyway at the end of the game). For what it's worth: I started with the release version and finished on 1.04 and never encountered anything so serious that it killed my enjoyment of the game.

Hm, it's an obvious bug, but at the same time an issue that will ever only be encountered by people wanting to actively exploit it, so imo the severity is less than certain other bugs (e.g. the Noonfrost issue, if that still exists, or the enemy AoE buffs affecting your party issue).

Well, I'm not payed for it either , but if I get around to looking into some of those things, I'll send you a message and you can include it into the original post.

I appreciate that you are trying to collect the unresolved issues into one thread, but please do some investigation into those issues before you post them! Simply reading through those few links shows that TS-reports 1,2,4 and 6 are the same issue and happen not due to TS being buggy, but rather because an ability of the Paladins in the Noonfrost quest is bugged. Issue 3 seems to be more of an inconsistency than a real bug (?) and 5 is probably not a bug either but a misunderstanding due to TS fully activating only in combat. If it's the same with other items in your list, you could probably cut the list in half already just from doing a little bit of research.

I think that at least in the case of Ring of Death the reason is to make the spell actually usable. RoD covered a huge area, making it pretty much impossible most of the time to not also target most of your party. Also for a high-level spell the effect wasn't that large either, most of the time.

I think it should. I played a bit on my Thinkpad Edge E330, which has a weaker CPU and GPU (i3 3110M with HD4000), and it worked well enough. Definitely playable. It might be that you need to reduce the resolution a bit, depending on the native resolution of your display.

I have used the unofficial Linux patch from the GOG forums and it worked fine for me. It's much smaller than the entire tarball, but obviously there's not much technical support for it. Anyway it might be worth a try. If, for some reason, you don't like to use that, the tarballs available for download have been updated pretty soon after Obsidian released 1.04. For some strange reason GOG decided to number it 1.2.0.3, so don't get confused by that, it's actually 1.0.4.

It should have fixed all these issues if Obsidian fixed the cause of the issue rather than the symptoms. Just from the changelog we can't actually be sure, though. I do know a fix for Linux, but I'm not sure about Windows.

I wonder what the advantages of Unity 5 would be for PoE. Much of the shiny new things in U5 don't seem that important for a pseudo-2D game like PoE. Maybe easier modding.

I mean that your char is "awakened", did that come up there as well?

Hm, as long as they don't overuse it, some manifestations would have been interesting. Not in a way that totally altered existing monsters maybe (I don't think that would make too much sense), but in the form of enemies appearing at certain points in the game, where some memory got triggered. I think at the start you initially don't know anything anyway and only once you reach Gilded Vale and talk to the dead dwarf women you find out about being a watcher. The whole awakened thing, though? I don't really remember when that was first brought up...

I think they wanted to keep it vague in a "WTF is happening with me" kind of way - after all there's no reason for most of the character backgrounds to know what's going on and the setting is new for the player as well. In a way I liked that, but they probably stayed a bit too ambigous. It really only became clear what's going on with that madness thing once you came to Twin Elms and talked to the two tree-women, and then many players probably missed it. There have been hints and such before - one could figure as much from the chat with Maerwald, but that was never very obvious.

Adra too only seems to exist in Eir Glanfath. So it might be a property of the land. Or it's indeed linked to the Engwithans in some other way. Who knows, the game seems pretty vague on this. The possible madness is caused by your awakening creating an internal conflict for your soul due to something from your past life troubling you, not by being a watcher. It's indeed kept very much in the background, though, so I found it hard to judge what Obsidian intended with it. The question is how could they convey effects of a potential madness to the player without running into further problems? They could add some more flavour text and visual effects once in a while, but that won't satisfy many players, since it will still be inconsequential. Probably still better than nothing, though. If they e.g. create some effect that will negatively impact the player character, they could only use it for a very limited amount of time, otherwise it will be detrimental to the enjoyment of most people (because who wants to play a permanently gimped character). In effect you would have some impact and receive a quest to get rid of it again asap. Then of course they could give some beneficial effects, but then again many people will complain that the madness thing doesn't feel like a problem, after all it makes you stronger.

I suspect that AoE attacks and aura-like abilities like the fear effect on Drakes and other enemies correctly target will/reflex/fortitude (whatever applies). It seems to me that just some of the directed one-char attacks are (erroneously, imho) targeting purely deflection. It might make sense for the Dank Spores to roll against deflection first - but I think they should then roll against Will or Fortitude (if considered a poison) for the additional effect to keep it consistent. The ranged Fampyr attacks should imo directly roll against Will. Generally the importance of Will/Fortitude/Reflex would be increased by having more enemies that target those defences with strong effects.

Was the same for me, you need to force-attack the dragon if you betray her to Falenroed. Some trigger doesn't seem to work right - I guess the soulless state should only trigger if you did transfer the dragon soul, not if you refuse to do so.

Because there's no reason for it. Defiance Bay is open to the player again the moment you reach Twin Elms. In fact the whole "closing" of Defiance Bay is such a non-event, it makes me wonder why they even did it.

That might actually be true, but (at least up to hard difficulty on which I played) it's rarely necessary to stack several defense buffs on your party members or debuffs on enemies. In fact it happened to me so rarely that I only distinctly remember the fights with the Adra Dragon and Thaos. It might be that stacking some effects would improve my groups performance during many other fights, but it's hardly ever resulting in such an advantage that I actually did it, let alone considered it necessary. But this is why I advocate increasing resistances and effects/duration of spells and abilities across the board, at least on Hard and PotD difficulty.

You wouldn't need to buff it so much that it makes you effectively immune, but with the way the system works (miss/graze/hit/crit), small changes will often only move a few hits into graze territory and vice versa. That is a statistical noteworthy effect, but it's hardly perceptible, since you will still have a lot of attacks causing an effect, only some more will do so at a reduced rate. Btw., I think the other defences would already become more important if more enemies used spells and spell-like abilities, esp. AoE effects and those had both a longer duration and would be stronger than current effects usually are.

I think the problem with those talents isn't that deflection is the most important defensive attribute, it's that their effect is relatively small at +10 considering that you have to invest a talent. But it's interesting to note that they seemingly directly add a bonus when defending against the effect, not just the Will roll. That should help if the attack targets deflection, too. That some of the attacks targt deflection directly, rather than the expected Will is still strange, imo, considering one would intuitively increase will rather than deflection against chamr/dominate/confuse attacks.

But even if we consider that they spit something at you, I would expect that it works like other attacks that have additional effects, i.e. first it's checked if the attack hits (deflection), then a roll is made for the additional effect against the respective defense (will in that case). That isn't happening, though.

After a discussion on the usefulness of talents like Mental Fortress (http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/77842-body-control-mental-fortress-unstoppable-broken/), it was brought up that certain Charm/Confuse attacks actually target deflection rather than will. In particular the Confusion attack from Dank Spores and the Charm attack of Fampyrs go directly against the targeted character's Deflection attribute, not the Will attribute as one would expect. In contrast to some "special" attacks that can trigger an additional effect after a 2nd roll, those attacks only target deflection, at no point is another defensive attribute (i.e. Willpower in this case) ever involved. In consequence it's useless to bolster Will to defend against certain enemies - I suspect that aside from the two types mentioned here, more enemies are subject to this issue.

I checked it, seems the Fampyr Charm is indeed checked against deflection, not will...

That's actually 1.04, but GOG's internal numbering is off for Linux (although they use the same as Obsidian for Windows). Just GOG being GOG. If you already have 1.03 and don't like to dl the entire tarball again, you can also use the unofficial patch (see the gog forums), which is much smaller.

This is interesting - deflection being checked in the troll encounter is intuitive and while it makes deflection more important, there are still effects that directly target fortitude, as well. However, a confuse/charm attack that directly targets deflection and deflection only seems like either a nonsensical design decision (if deliberate) or an obvious bug. Can someone confirm that it is the same for Fampyrs? I can't check it right now.