Story Achievements
You'll get these unmissable achievements by completing the story missions.
What Once Was Lost
First Steps
Banished
Brought to Heel
Lord of Horror
Fall and Rise
For Gondor
Undeath Defeats Death
Banish the Darkness
Stalemate is Victory
Peace in Death
This last one, Peace in Death, only pops after completing the Shadow Wars in Act IV.
Item Achievements
Rule of Three: Unlock three gem slots. Gem slots need to be purchased from the inventory screen- you'll buy them with mirian- one gem slot for each equipment type.
Forger: Combine three gems (of the same type and quality) into a gem on the next highest quality. Do this from your Inventory screen, once you have three gems that qualify.
Master Forger: Forge a top tier gem. See our Gem Hunting guide for tips on getting enough raw material.
Fit for War: Upgrade a piece of gear. In its description, each piece of gear you get will tell your under what conditions you can upgrade it. Usually it'll be something along the lines of stealth killing some number of enemies, or shooting someone while they're poisoned, or dazing a captain while below 25% Health, or something equally arbitrary. Fulfill the condition, then return to the Inventory screen and pay a nominal about of mirian to upgrade the gear in question. You'll probably do this many, many times throughout the game.
Collectibles Achievements
Speak Friend and Enter: Open one of the Ithildin Doors. To do this, use the haedir to locate all the ithildin runes in a given area, inspect them all, then visit the barrow and complete the poem. Check this very guide for the solutions to each door listed by location.
Finished Tales: Recover all Gondorian Artifacts. You can find all but one of these via the haedir (get the one atop the Seregost icefall but starting at the very bottom and climbign your way up). The last artificat you get as part of the Gondor Story Mission 'The Uninvited.'
The Web Revealed: Uncover the final Shelob Memory and reveal the Web of Fate. Use the haeldir in all five regions to track down Shelob's Memories. When you've collected them all, a new memory will appear in Cirith Ungol, near Shelob's lair. Solve this last memory for the achievement.
Second Age Warrior: Complete all the Shadow of the Past missions in one region. Each region starts with four such missions, and then fifth which pops up when those are complete. Individual mission breakthroughs are included in this guide, but note that this achievement only requires mission completion, it doesn't regiser whether secondary objectives have been completed.
Feat Achievements
Hostile Takeover: Defeat a Warchief. These orcs rank above mere captains but below overlords. You will find it virtually impossible to beat the game without besting dozens, perhaps hundreds of warchiefs.
Vandal: Destroy a Monument. Monuments are marked on your minimap- just climb all the way to the top of one (all the way- up to the shoulder a statue doesn't count), then use L-CTRL to blast it to pieces.
Promise Keeper: Issue a Death Threat, then kill the target. Death Threats do increase the level of the target orc, so maybe start with someone comfortably below your weight class.
Dismantled: Disable an Outpost. The outpost sub-missions appear on your map. Select one to take out a local orc boss, disable the Alarm for that area, and snag this achievement.
Death Is Not The End: Resurrect a Follower Captain. This won't come until the late game, when Talion develops a more diverse power set. Use those same dark powers to bring a captain back from the dead for this achievement.
Forged by War: Unlock all player skills. This doesn't mean buying them, just that they're available to buy. It also doesn't count skill upgrades, just the skills themselves. You won't be able to unlock this until completing the 'Bright Lord' quest, which grant Talion a final surprise skill.
Purge: Purify All the haedir. Just a good practice anyway. You won't be able to get this achievement until after the Fight Pits mission in Nurnen, which makes the final two game regions available to you.
The Operative: Turn all of a Warchief's bodyguards ( at least two) into spies, then confront him. Use the Army screen and hover the cursor over your target Warchief- lines will connect him to his bodyguards. Hunt down and Dominate them, choosing the spy option once they've been converted. Lastly select the Warchief's mission and execute it to watch the betrayal in action, and score this achievement.
No Orc Left Behind: Rescue a follower who's been captured. This happens when a Fortress of your has fallen- you'll get a special mission to rescue the Overlord. The rescues that take place in the story mission do not count toward this achievement.
Better Luck Next Time: Meet an Enemy or Follower who has cheated death. There's no real way to evoke this one- just keep going through the game killing orcs, and sooner or later one will turn up again, crowing about his brush with the hereafter. This may also happen to Followers killed in combat, who miraculously survive and return as your enemies.
I Like to Watch: Watch a Follower murder another Captain without helping him. Just watching a Fight Pit match will pop this achievement, though nemesis missions work too.
Feed the Beasts: Attract every kind of beast using bait. Bait is the stuff hanging in bundles around most orc fortresses and settlements. Shoot it down to summon beasts- shoot all types down to get this achievement.
The Stuff of Legend: Equip a full Legendary Gear set. The first full set you can obtain is the Bright Lord gear, which you can get by solving all the Ithildin Doors, and beating all the Shadows of the Past tests. The other surefire set is to hold on to all your original equipment- it will elevate to Legendary when you complete the Bright Lord mission in the late game.
Headhunter: Recruit a Follower of every Advanced Class. You can check out the class of potential recruits in the Army screen, but you have to recruit so many orcs over the course of the game that you're likely to pop this without even trying. The ten classes in the game are Assassin, Beastmaster, Berserker, Commander, Destroyer, Marksman, , Tank, Tracker, Trickster & Slayer; if you need to double check.
Best Defense: Equip 3 Siege Upgrades on an Assault Team. You'll need to spend Mirian to do so. When you're planning your assault, buy three siege upgrades on three *different* assault leaders. Make sure all three are active to pop this achievement.
No Orc Lives Forever: Win all Fight Pit Missions. See our Fight Pit Guide for more.
It Came from Within: Start a Conquest with all Warchiefs as spies. To accomplish this you'll need to slaughter all the warchiefs of a fortress that doesn't belong to you, then assign one of your own followers to Infiltrate a Warchief spot in the Army screen. Complete this mission, and then immediately begin your siege to pop the achievement.
Everything is Permitted: Shame an Assassin until he becomes Deranged. You can't derange people until you've completed the Bruz questline. Use the new 'Worse Than Death' skill upgrade to shame captains with the Assassin class. Derangements are random, but shame enough and you'll pop this achievement.
Power Couple: Send a Follower to support another follower in a Nemesis Mission. Do this from the Army screen, after you've Dominated several followers, and a turn or two has passed. Locate an Orc who isn't doing anything, and assign him to an Oc who's pursuing a Nemesis mission. You don't actually have to execute the mission- just the assignment is enough to pop the achievement.
Overkill: Once you've unlocked the Fit Pight missions in an area by conquering the local Fortress, set two of your followers to face each other in the arena. This time, the achievement doesn't pop until you've actually completed (which is to say, witnessed) the mission.
Rough Rider: Ride every type of beast and rare beast in the game. More than half the beasts available (caragor, dire caragor, drake, and graug) can be summoned by Talion directly. The trickier ones are the elemental Graugs- they come in Poison, Ice, and Fire varieties, and can be found in Nurnen, Seregost, and Gorgoroth respectively. Scout the land by air or on foot until you find them, then break and dominate them for the achievement (that, or some Legendary gear will let you mount Graugs without breaking them).
Wild Things: Kill a Drake with a Graug. This is easiest to get when you control both. Find a Graug to Dominate (perhaps in the course of getting the Rough Rider achievement above), then summon a drake. Unlike Followers, drakes won't turn on you no matter how much you damage them, so groundit, damage it, and then use teh graug to pummel it.
Trolling: Kill a Captain while riding an Olog. This is best done in the early game, when captains are still relatively fragile, but it's still a hard get. Face a captain in an Olog rich environment (you can scan descriptions to find one with the Band of Ologs perk), then whittle him down to near death. Make sure you aren't using weapons with damage-over-time effects that might push him over the edge. Then stun an olog with an arrow to the face, and aim him toward the captain. This may require several tries to get right- olog are fiddly to control and don't do that much damage. Just keep at it until your luck holds. Other thing you can try to skew the balance in your favor is to switch to a low-level weapon to shave your target's health down as close to death as possible, and trying this during a siege where enemy Olog captains are plentiful, and deadlier than the garden variety.
Blood on Blood: Use the intel gleaned from worms to identify two blood brothers in the same region. Dominate one and set him to attack the other, then activate the mission. You can help out a bit, but the killing blow has to be struck by your Captain to pop this achievement.
Bad Boss: Strike a Follower until he's had enough. Just attack one of your own captains until he turns on you. You monster.
Follower Perks: Use a Training Order to give a follower of yours his own gang. Training orders only come from War Chests. You'll be given a couple during he course of the game- if you get a gang-related training order that way, you're all set. Otherwise you'll have to buy more using Mirian, or gold scraped together from completing Daily Challenges. Like all such loot boxes, the contents are random.
Achievements that Require Your Death
Avenged: Complete a Vendetta mission. These are marked by a crossed stakes icon in the map indicating orcs who have killed you. Kill them right back for the achievement.
Life of the Party: This also deals with Vendetta Missions. Send a follower of the destroyer type to kill and orc who has previously killed you. You'll get this achievement just for setting up the mission- you don't have to complete it.
If You Can't Beat Them: Let the same orc kill you three times, then Dominate him. It's wise to try for this one early, to reduce that chances of your target having Iron Will. You'll also want to disable your Bodyguard if you have one, and preferably stage your encounters in a territory you don't control, so as to reduce the risk of sudden rescue. Lastly, equip the lowest grade armor you have, to make yourself extra vulnerable to the killing. You might even go so far as to increase teh game difficulty.
Vertical Mobility. Help a grunt become overlord. Once you have your own fortress, wander off somewhere in the region and let a no name grunt kill you. He'll be promoted to named, and you'll get a Vendetta mission to settle the score. Track him down, Dominate him, and then assign him to Overlord in the fortress. Perfectly reasonable.
Online Achievements
Bound by Blood: Complete an Online Vendetta. Don't worry about missing your chance, the game will repeatedly tell you when these missions become available.
Such Great Heights: Reach the rank of Captain in the Online Conquest mode. You don't actually have to play online missions- just upgrade your own fortresses in the single player, and login to the online game mode occasionally to check your status.