I greatly appreciate the herb nerf where you can't really raise your potential maximum stat with herbs anymore. Before this change, race was a rather inconsequential choice since early-to-mid-game played out the same for any character out there. Stay alive, find herbs, grind stats to 25+.

The main problem now is that races with low natural toughness are a lot harder to play throughout the game. They don't give an awful lot of reasons to even pick them anymore when you can never take more than 4 hits from any monster. I would like to see some way of realistically being able to raise your toughness beyond the natural attribute maximums. I have a few suggestions, ranked in terms of desirability:

1: Guaranteed potions of potential toughness/willpower/dexterity
2: Stat boosts much like the Ice Queen's quest reward, but for potential attribute ceilings.
3: Make attribute potentials easier to raise again (not really desirable)

Ways I would implement this:

1: Put said reward in a guaranteed room/boss encounter in the random dungeons in the wilderness. Obviously on the lowest level of the dungeons. This would be a great incentive to visit/explore them all.
2: Tack it onto quest rewards. For example killing the Greater Daemon in Dwarftown now not only gets you Big Punch, but also raises your potential toughness by +5. Or you get a few potions of potential -stat-
3: Allow the PC to choose one stat to raise the potential maximum by 1 upon each level up.


Going out on a limb here, considering the ideas to make appearance a more useful stat, you could tie option 3 with the charisma stat. Confidence breeds success, after all. Perhaps if 3 were to be implemented, reaching a certain charisma value would allow you to pick 2 attributes to raise the potential maximum, or make the boost 2.