gjaustin, what was your actual base damage (minus strength potion bonuses)? If all that's happening is the bonus wearing off after the initial attack, that might be the intended result since apparently strength potions are only supposed to work once. If it really is a bug then I'll reroll - or just default to Vampire, I guess. This week will be a good excuse to thoroughly test the monster classes for once.
Cheeky's only one point, so I suppose we'll see if it actually makes much difference in rankings. Prepping a transmutation scroll, Binlor, or JJ should get you past any roadblocks, and purist runs are relatively easy to scum (especially when you only have to scout the first few passages to see if restarting is necessary). And Tinkers and Half-dragons shouldn't have too much trouble with it anyway.