Now that combat has a bigger focus, how about implementing more ways to better improve Hearthlings?
I was thinking maybe the Herbalist can make Elixirs that permanently increase Mind, Body, and Spirit.
Higher tier Herbalist recipes:
Elixir of Mind
Elixir of Body
Elixir of Spirit
Each one can increase a stat by 1 and would require quite a bit to craft. This would also make good endgame goal. This might even scale well with the new gong system.
Ehh, maybe if one of the materials was like an ogre’s tooth. But the tooth was very low chance to drop.
sounds more like a matter of grind and i’ll end up with max stat hearthlings…
if you want to join the “train stats” discussion we got a few thought out threads.
The Items needed could be tied in to the loot system to limit how often they can be made. Considering that you now need a sizable combat party in order to survive in hard mode, the potions can be used more to fill in gaps of needed stats from Hearthlings who joined later. There’s nothing wrong with maxing out stats later on in the game anyhows. It would mainly apply to single player games. In multiplayer, there’s a good chance a game is not gonna go on for 18 hours.
Well a feature based luck is not a real goal, because whether u achieve it too fast (and game gets boring) or you’ll end up with no luck (=frustration). With a tradeoff like giving a buff for one stat and a debuff for another i could see it as a feature, but not as solution for balancing hearthlings.
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/i-want-to-dismiss-my-hearthlings-or-train-stats/19602
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/a-small-idea-to-better-your-heartlings/17737/6
some older threads, read a bit before we start a “stat training” thread again.
There isn’t a problem with a feature based on chance. The spawns, your Hearthlings, the loot, and even the map you play on is all based on chance. There isn’t anything wrong with adding another.
My suggestion also isn’t about just stats. It’s also about giving the Herbalist more purpose as well. With the Cleric taking care of the healing, the Herbalist’s purpose stops at mid level with temporary buff potions. These Elixirs would make it worthwhile to level up the Herbalist to higher levels.
I agree. So far, all the herbalist is for, for me, is to make him a cleric 
But the whole suggested purpose of the herbalist is based on luck and this is very unbalanced, between never be used because the ingredients rarely drop or they drop too many and you’ll end up with mass of it. Which will lead to very powerful hearthlings.
An apothecary or alchemist is already planned or mentioned, so really powerfull potions would be his jobs.
For the herbalist i personally see more herbal oriented mechanics, like roaming in “forest area” and searhcing for rare plants, roots and shrooms (not yielded manually or grown by farmers), maybe he cultivates 'em in cropplots or big fallen woodlogs (=more furniture) in small quantaties to create healing stuff against plagues or other special wounds which can’t be healed directly by a cleric. Beehives would also fit his role. Such things would add more immersive and rotating gameplay.
As for the stat issues of hearthlings i’ll post later something, just need to reread some older threads.