Kinda my first time here, so I hope I’m doing this right. I wasn’t able to find any other topics about this though.
As I’ve been playing, something that’s occurred to me is that it seems like spirit is grossly underpowered compared to body and mind. Generally speaking, some stats are certainly more useful to certain professions than others, but they’re still of at least -some- importance to everyone, regardless of profession. Crafters may benefit the most from a high mind, defenders and laborers may benefit the most from a high body, and caretakers and healers may benefit the most from a high spirit, but there’s still at least some marginal (and sometimes no so marginal) benefits to every stat to every single profession.
Even if you’re not a crafter, having a high mind means you gain XP faster and need less sleep, so it’s beneficial no matter what your profession is.
Even if you’re not a soldier, having a high body means you move faster and have more HP, which is beneficial to laborers (like farmers and workers) and caretakers that tend to travel far from home (like shepherds and trappers).
But what about spirit? Spirit has specific bonuses for caretakers and healers, but the only “general” bonuses spirit provides is you regen HP faster and are less likely to flee from combat, except those are traits that don’t really benefit anyone BESIDES defenders. Spirit might be great for caretakers and defenders, but it doesn’t really do squat for laborers and crafters.
In my opinion, spirit needs an additional generic benefit that is helpful to -everyone-. I would suggest giving it some kind of bonus to morale conversations. Perhaps make it so that the compassion secondary stat improves their chances of a good conversation with other people. Right now the only things that seem to affect conversations is the traits of each hearthling and their current mood, which tends to mean that once a few people start to get unhappy, it’s really easy for the entire village to become happy, just from the bad conversations alone.
Another possibility would be to make it so that compassion decreases the duration for how long a bad conversation affects them for. It seems to me like a hearthling with a high spirit should be more resilient to being disparaged by others. So crossing paths with somebody who’s unhappy and having a bad conversation with them as a result might get them down a bit, but a hearthling with a high spirit would bounce back faster.
These are just my thoughts and ramblings. Please feel free to give me your input and feedback!