I had an Heroic Skratti with improved strength, he had somehting like 70 or 80ish strength iirc.
Wearing a soul contract, he just one shotted attracted horrors to death with his staff
I think the mis-matched heroic abilities are good. It is interesting, creates characters with unique combinations of abilities, and means that the hall of fame is not guaranteed to create someone super-good in their usual role. That's all good in my book.
Heroic attack skill on a spellcaster? That's interesting, and not useless. Some spells require the caster to touch the target, and casters do get into hand-to-hand combat (a high-risk cause of death). One of my more memorable and interesting characters is Henrik the priest who won the arena deathmatch championship, and now is a magic-trident-wielding melee machine who happens to be a priest.
You missed one of the heroic abilities, which I've only seen show up once so far
I don't remember it's exact name, but it ramps up your research speed. Quetzalcoatl got it for me with Mictlan, and by the time he fell out of the hall of fame, his research speed was up to 37!
Needless to say, that's one of my favorite heroic abilities