Middle-earth: Shadow of War

• Use your Mirian to unlock the gem slots on your gear first. Don't bother with lootboxes until later, they scale with your level.

• Post game is a bit different so don't look up videos of it if you don't want to be spoiled.

• Shadow of War after patching has a wide range of very nuanced difficulty settings, including something that works rather a lot like Devil May Cry's "Heaven or Hell" difficulty setting - everything dies very quickly, including yourself.

• It does still provide a better experience if you die every so often so that you can get the most out of the Nemesis system, but you do no longer need to intentionally gimp yourself for that to happen.

• The first four hours of the game are going to be like, almost a tutorial to catch you up again from the first one. Just like the first game, it opens up more once you can recruit orcs.

• I forgot it existed, but you can slide into orcs. That move would have made combat a lot faster than chipping away at some hardened Legendaries.

• Don't forget to import your SOM save.

• Some side missions are gated behind having a certain ability, so it's good to spend your perk points unlocking all the abilities first, and then go back and unlock the ability modifiers later.

• If you have a piece of gear that is low level but has good traits you can spend some cash to upgrade it to Talion's current level - that option's not super obvious in the UI, but is available right from the beginning.

• As in the first game the captains you should recruit are whichever ones are the funniest.

• If you're just playing the main story campaign, you can basically do whatever, it really isn't very hard. Just pick the captains you think are fun, they'll nearly all become outleveled by better captains from more difficult regions anyway. As of the latest patch, you will receive 80 perk points from level ups plus a number from side missions and special achievement-type stuff, so you'll have pretty much for anything you want.

• Get all the main perks (the big symbols) first because they're all good for something no matter how you specifically want to play. You will receive enough points to get pretty much all of them, but the ones I find particular useful are: double parry (your ghost parries an extra dude for you, you never get attacked by more than two at a time), quick dominate, extra drops, Shadow Strike Pull (teleport orc to you instead of you to orc, great for stealthy captain grabbing to high places) as well as the one that lets you shadow mount unbroken Carragors plus the one that grabs all Carragors around them. That can single-handedly take out entire mounted patrols and neuter them completely. I also like the one that lets you poison grog at a distance because it makes it so that when you shoot them, there is a massive explosion of Balefire (poison flame) that kills practically anything short of a captain in one hit.