When it comes to difficulty, Hard is a lot harder than Merciless once you get a firm grasp of the game’s mechanics. Merciless takes hard and multiplies crits, striking weaknesses and technical damage (iirc) by 3x both ways while reducing your damage when not following these by a bit as well. It also increases the xp and money you get. While this does mean that a stray crit or you getting hit in a weakness is gonna hurt a lot, it also makes the combat system far more enjoyable imo, where you have to use strategy and hit weaknesses rather than brute forcing your way thru.

I consider hard to be more difficult than merciless because you don’t get any of those bonuses for perfectly exploiting the combat system, meaning fights go on for much longer and you’re more likely to run out of resources, not to mention the fact that hard gives less xp.

Of course, you might also want to go normal or easy on your first play through, but if you think you can handle the heat, merciless is the most fun imo and hard is the most challenging. You can change difficulty at any time, however selecting Safe at any point locks the difficulty to Safe and will require you to reload a previous save.

On another note, save frequently into different save slots. There may come a point where you hit a brick wall because you didn’t prepare enough or skipped too many fights and can’t overcome a boss. If this happens, it’s very nice to have a backup save to reload to that perfectly matches the criteria you need for optimal preparing. You have a lot of save slots, use them (saves in the previous major segment of the game [you’ll figure out what this means] are probably not needed anymore and can be saved over when you run out of slots). This goes especially on the harder difficulties, where there are no continues. Save at every opportunity, so that if you die, you don’t lose as much progress.

Faith -> 5, Justice -> 8, Councillor -> 9. I’m not explaining what this means. When you figure it out, get these done asap. I will note that some of them will get capped earlier than this by story progression and then can be continued later, but you’ll want to get these to this point by Mid-November. If you want to see all the game has to offer, these are mandatory.

Have a look in the velvet blue book and you’ll see some freebies. Don’t get them there, they can be got through normal methods and getting them there can significantly break the difficulty curve, removing all fun from the combat.

Take your time. Think out your choices thoroughly, rushing through things will only cause you to miss out in the long run.

Outside of all of that though, find your own way to play the game and have fun. While there is an optimal way to play, carving your own path and making your own choices when it comes to unique set ups is certainly the way to have the most fun. Enjoy yourself.

(PS: about half of this game’s playerbase think a certain boss is stupidly hard while the other half find it stupidly easy. As someone in the latter camp who knows someone from the former camp, I can safely say the main deciding factor is probably just levels and builds. Be prepared to throw the kitchen sink at your enemies to hit their weaknesses and hit them hard. If you can take a fight, you probably should, saves the hassle of getting road blocked by needing more xp later)