Hello fellow spirit-eaters (may contain spoilers)

I have played MotB before (once as a suppresor, and once as a devourer) a couple years ago.

Now I am finishing my second devourer playthrough (can't imagine playing MotB as a good guy ever again - it's the best evil cRPG campaign ever!). And it seems that it is very difficult to get a reasonable amount of spirit essences. As far as I know the only reliable source of brilliant essences are vases in the Dead God's Pantry - I actually gave up on these, as I was fed up with the 5m cooldown and din't have eternal rest, so I was worried resting would've depleted my spirit energy too much.

I also know you get a Pristine essence from devouring sleeper.

But whenever I try to devour anything else, what I get is a volatile spirit essence (even the ice troll badger, which seemed to be a powerful spirit). Since I need eight of these to make one brilliant essence, and several of them to actually make something useful - I wonder, what enemies are worthy to be targetted?

It's not that these essences are that useful, as the stat enahncement can be achieved by regular crafting for which there are plenty of essences (except vampiric regeneration, and the +9 vs +8 difference in stat boost is negligible anyways). But I wonder - there must be some enemies that are guaranteed to give brilliant or pristine essences. Just getting into a big fight, carefully dropping everyone to near death, preventing them from getting killed by the rest of the party and spirit gorging - it just seems ot much of an effort for a couple measly volatile essences, when every enemy can drop a brilliant power and couple of volatile elemental essences on their own.

There are guides for unique essences, but none for regular essences. At this point in game, I probably won't start crafting anything from them (getting Coven essences was painful enough) - but I'm just curious for future playthroughs.

And speaking of the Coven - is actually "stoning" them the only way to get enough essences? All the guides seem to say so - but this just seems wrong. Is it really how Obsidian intended us to get them? I heard you can use Ravenous Incarnation as well, but apparently this requires petrification as well (as you need to finish Coveya Kurgannis before getting to Myrkul and it seems you need to attack them as soon as you finished talking with them). Do you have a better way?

All in all - I like the spirit energy mechanics very much. But I feel something is fundamentally wrong with getting spirit essences.

When you try to rest in the lower death god's vault you get randomly attacked by stuff with good essences. I think you can enter that level a lot earlier than the quest related objectives in there would require, but I cannot remember specifics, it's been a few years. Main things I remember about the place is that there was tons of loot from random extremely-high level undead parties, awesome music, ghastly ambience. I spent hours in there one late, dark night, it was f@#!ng unbelievable.

Another infinite and faster source of mobs is the final fight with the wood man, but IIRC those were mostly essences of the lowest quality.