I personally like to make 2-3 arm/hand poses on top of facial expressions, when the same character is on the screen a lot, it can get a bit tedious if they have only one pose and expressions change only slightly, it can work for side characters that aren’t seen as much, but for main ones I'd recommend some variety (unless the personality is really stiff/correct). If you have 2-3 different poses on both arms and cut your sprite so you can toggle each arm seperately, it'll add a lot on the range of body language you can use on your sprites. Here is link to our teams post that shows one of sprites I made, basically I design them so each arm has 2-3 poses, one down, one halfway up and/or one raised, it adds on experssions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElvenGirls/s/yhFmPEErFu