On harder difficulty, the enemies will have more spirit. For example the elf will have 2.
I have a hard save, I have beat the game so far there. I will check that using analyze.
It was a good guess, but you were wrong. Using analyze, it showed that an elf has 1 spirit.
Not sure what happened there. Most enemies only have a single spirit point. Maybe your game got bugged, check the Discord.
