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For the increase of the Attribute values, you can still use Blood Sworn. It gives +2 to one Attribute and +1 to another one.
Of course, you have to find someone loyal to you and you must be loyal to him/her.

So, one of the... issues... you have with this, Roth, is that there isn't a random method in the book anymore?

Okay... so what?

Honestly, random stat generation is something that is largely gone outside of the OSR movement, and I always felt that it was in ED1 as a nod to old-school D&D (which served as a kind of inspiration for all sorts of things in ED).

With regard to Karma, spending Legend on Karma has always struck me as problematic. After you get a couple of Circles under your belt, the cost doesn't do anything except create difficulties in record keeping (and it was the only cost in the game not based on multiples of 100), and having the costs *and* dice *and* caps for each race being different... I just don't see that much balance in there, outside of the die type being tied to the net racial modifiers. Karma Ritual served as a limiter on replenishment, and that largely became irrelevant beyond a certain point unless you were in a particular situation where you weren't giving your characters much chance to rest.

And then, some Disciplines were really big users of Karma, others not so much (based on Discipline talents, as well as what talents typically saw use most often in play).

It's a lot of (IMO) needless complexity, with one sub-system trying to serve a bunch of different roles. It worked -- don't get me wrong -- but when looking at the new edition, we did our best to not carry certain assumptions simply because it was the way it used to be done.

Karma is now more heavily focused on being a bonus-die mechanic, and one of the primary ways that a talent has an edge over the equivalent skill (rather than a bunch of minor differences that "hamstring" skill use and require GMs and players to keep track of two slightly different versions of the same thing). A Swordmaster will have an edge over an equivalent mundane guard -- even if they both have the same rank in Melee Weapons -- because the adept has a bit of magic he can call on to give him an edge.

I always felt that talents should have an edge over skills. Like the Swordmaster vs the mundane guard in the exemple above.

Free karma can now be the solution. I think that entirely replenish the karma points may be too much though.