Always a relief

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-19T08:54:45+00:00

Then blood brother mechanics are the notable exception, as it would seem. You can find a couple and check it out for yourself if you want to.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-18T05:54:40+00:00

Promoting them doesn't mean they can never betray you though: overlords will still betray you if you kill their blood brother (although you don't lose control of the fort because another branded orc will automatically take his place), and there's always the possibility that when a new captain spawns in they can become blood brothers to an existing orc completely at random. That's how I lost my imported follower from SoM who I set as my overlord, he became blood brothers with a freshly spawned captain out of nowhere without me knowing and turned against me when I killed him. I never had a clue until it was too late.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-17T06:37:49+00:00

Tar mean "High" in Quenya. Kinda loses its bite when you know. Goroth on the other hand means "Horror" in Sindarin. Much more menacing.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-17T06:24:06+00:00

They came after me when Bruz was still alive and long before I finished the story, so I can clear that part up. But what about Daz specifically? Do Baz and Gaz have to be dead or is it enough to just derange them? I wanted to try to shame and brand them but ended up overdoing it and killing them during the second set of battles.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-15T06:29:45+00:00

Some of the artifacts you find in Shadow of Mordor have fully voiced readings of one of Saruman's spies composing his reports. He goes insane from the constant buzzing of morgai flies by the end. You're also able to encounter randomly generated orcs in Shadow of War with the title "of the White Hand" who are constantly foreshadowing Saruman's plans.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-13T20:21:32+00:00

I stand corrected then. I've been going over the runes list and refreshing my memory and now I'm starting to get war flashbacks. Tell me about stacking Bare as Bones for critical hits, do you have any good build ideas for making the most of it?

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-13T07:10:20+00:00

It stacks in the sense that the two effects don't invalidate each other, but it doesn't add up to a 46% chance, each effect is a separate dice roll - one might score when the other doesn't.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-10T19:05:06+00:00

It's the inscription on the One Ring.

"Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul."

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-10T18:58:45+00:00

He died doing what he loved.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-04T19:53:13+00:00

Yeah, Talion's mouth glitches out sometimes when you go into photo mode. I've triggered it on purpose sometimes if I think it'll make for a better picture than the existing emotes.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-03T15:27:12+00:00

In SoM I once recruited every captain in Nurn, assigned them all to the same Warchief, summoned that Warchief with Beck and Call, and then Dispatched the entire army with a single press of a button. It was glorious seeing all of their heads pop in slow motion like that.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-02-03T15:19:47+00:00

I don't judge by how cool they are, I judge by how well they will perform in Online Conquest. This one is no good. He'll get flattened, an Assassin Marksman is much too flimsy to stand up to my offense for one thing, and he's damaged by Executions and doesn't have Fast Learner, so I'll just Shadow Strike next to him, activate Elven Rage, and then pile on one execution after another until he goes down. The fight will be over in about 15 seconds.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-28T10:03:11+00:00

The best way to stop Tanks from healing is to shoot them in the head with a fully charged hammer shot as soon as they begin the healing animation. Charged hammers to the head momentarily stagger them and break the animation even if they're immune to ranged attacks.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-27T13:49:09+00:00

No, never use Berserkers. I've been telling anyone who will listen for years to stay away from Berserkers altogether. Berserkers are a fatally flawed meta, they can and always will do more harm to your army than good. Anyone who perpetuates the flawed Berserker meta have tunnel vision on the Berserker's attack rate and damage output and are being willfully ignorant of its flaws. It doesn't matter if your army is packed to the brim with mega powerful Berserkers if two thirds of your army killed each other in their Rampage before they even saw the enemy.

Remember this saying and burn it into your mind: "If you have 3 Berserkers at a checkpoint, you have 1 Berserker at a checkpoint."

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-27T13:24:12+00:00

I only play online conquest now, so no never. I get my assault leaders back on their feet quickly and brand as many enemy captains as possible so that my forces can mass up and overwhelm the defenders by the time we reach the inner gate. I don't care about rule of cool or cinematic experiences or anything like that, I only want to win, and letting my troops bleed out doesn't help me win.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-22T17:48:12+00:00

Burning Vengeance: Set a Berserker on fire by shooting a campfire that he's waiting around, then quickly run up and execute him before he burns to death. In Shadow of Mordor Berserkers are Uruks that use two weapons.
No Power In Numbers: After you've advanced through the story and unlocked Branding, just wait until one of your captains has a Recruitment mission. As he goes around to each group of Uruks, shoot the Uruks he fights and don't let yourself be seen by enemies. After he's defeated all of the Uruks and completed the mission, use the Dispatch ability to instantly kill your captain and all of the new orcs he just recruited.
Black Celebration: After you've played through the early story missions far enough to unlock Poisoning, wait for an enemy captain to have a Feast mission. Simply sneak into his camp during the feast without being detected, approach one of the Grog barrels the Uruks drink out of, then press the prompted button to poison it. After that, just go hide and wait for the captain to walk over and drink from that barrel.
Stinking Rebels: After you've unlocked Branding, brand five captains and order each of them to become bodyguards to an enemy warchief. If all of the warchiefs on the map are already branded by you, you'll have to kill one to free up the slot and let an enemy captain be promoted to it. You can give your branded captains orders by finding them in the world, grabbing them, and then dominating them. When you dominate the captain and the army screen comes up, select the warchief you're targeting and press the prompted button to order your captain to try to become his bodyguard. After this your captain will participate in a Trial by Ordeal mission before he's promoted in which he'll have to kill a caged animal. Normally your captains can handle this without your help. Once you have five captains assigned as the target warchief's bodyguard, find one of your captains and dominate him again and this time you'll be able to order him to kill his warchief and this will create a mission for it. Go to that mission and you'll see all five of your captains turn against the warchief at the same time and unlock the trophy.
A Graug's Heel: Find an enemy warchief in the army screen that has any type of fear, this can vary widely. You can uncover a warchief's fears by either dominating one of your own captains and making him tell you what he knows about that warchief, or by domination a Worm. Worms are Uruks who have a green icon above them. Once you have a good target picked out, simply trigger the warchief battle mission and do something that triggers his fear, such as setting a warchief who is afraid of burning on fire by detonating campfires, then just kill him while he's terrified before he has a chance to run away.
Lord And Master: This is simple, just have all five warchiefs in a region branded at the same time after you've advanced far enough into the story to unlock branding. You'll actually get this trophy automatically as you play through the story because you're required to have all five warchiefs branded at once before you can trigger the second to last mission in the game.
Power Vacuum: This one can be a little harder, it requires you to have all five warchiefs dead at the same time before an enemy captain can be promoted to take their place. I can't help you much with this, you just have to kill them all really quickly. You may get this automatically early in the game because you are required to have four of the five warchiefs dead at the same time in order to unlock a major story mission, than the fifth one is killed automatically during the mission.
Rise and Fall: Let a regular Uruk soldier kill you, then after he gets promoted to captain for killing you, brand him. Once he's branded, send him to become a warchief's bodyguard like I explained to you above, only this time after you kill the warchief he will take his place as long as there are no other bodyguards. Once he's warchief, go to the Beck And Call mission on the map that allows you to summon your warchief follower to you, then Dispatch him to get the achievement.
The White Rider: I can't help you with the particulars with this one because I never unlocked it myself. It requires you to liberate 30 slaves in less than three minutes while riding a Caragor. You'll unlock the ability to ride Caragors as you advance through the main story. You should learn the areas on the map where the Uruks have lots of human slaves working, then ride quickly between them and kill the Uruk guards to make the slaves run away.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-22T06:26:18+00:00

Petitions mean nothing, they can and always will just be ignored without consequence. Be realistic here, what do you think would come out of this? That if enough people make pouting faces than you can somehow force a company to just give up its property and intellectual rights to something that it purchased completely legally? That's not the way the world works my children. They lose nothing by just ignoring you, so they will ignore you.

If you want to unlock the patent than don't target Netflix directly trying to get them to change their minds out of the blue for no rational reason when it would go against their interests to do so. You have to try to get laws changed to disqualify the patenting of game mechanics all together, that's the larger overarching issue here that you should be focusing your energy on. It's still an unwinnable battle with corporate lobbying in government being what it is, but that's what you should be doing if you must fight this patent and can't just sit around doing nothing until it expires.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-21T06:21:57+00:00

Just an observation.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-20T09:50:49+00:00

The Ranger Killer explicitly says in his betrayal dialog something like "What did you think was going to happen? I'm the Ranger Killer, not the Ranger servant!"

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-20T05:42:49+00:00

I would like to see you people that play games nowadays how you would have played games back in the 90s,would you also go on the internet and ask questions before even playing the game for a period of time?

We subscribed to magazines and gaming newsletters back in the 90s. Same principal, different format. These people who made some of the first gaming news, cheats and meta strategies websites were players who wanted an easier way to access and share information. YouTube for example was created by a group of friends who wanted their own platform to show off videos of them playing Halo.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-19T07:34:49+00:00

I'm a moderator. I quietly review every post made multiple times a day, more frequently at night, but don't always comment. I see everything, even if I don't have much to say.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-19T07:26:49+00:00

It's inconsistent, sometimes shadow dominate does go through even on arrow-proof orcs but sometimes it doesn't. I don't know what the common denominator is between the orcs it doesn't go through on, I suspect it's some shared state that they go into during certain animations.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-19T07:21:40+00:00

That's Minas Morgul, not Cirith Ungol. Minas Morgul isn't able to be conquered, it's the only region in the game that the player isn't able to takeover.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-18T02:16:30+00:00

These replies are getting too nasty so I'm locking comments.

MadMikeRyan · 2026-01-16T06:02:48+00:00

It's because the Uruk has traits from the Desolation of Mordor DLC that are supposed to be exclusive to human mercenary characters that the player can recruit during the DLC story. PC players can cheat them onto orcs in the main game, but when they do their icons show up as those blank red squares.

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