I've seen a couple people saying Mind Blast and the House Agent's Back Stab are underpowered, but consider what the Stunned Condition does:
While you have the Stunned condition, you experience the following effects.
- Incapacitated. You have the Incapacitated condition.
- Saving Throws Affected. You automatically fail Strength and Dexterity saving throws.
- Attacks Affected. Attack rolls against you have Advantage.
And then the Incapacitated condition stacks on top of that:
While you have the Incapacitated condition, you experience the following effects.
- Inactive. You can’t take any action, Bonus Action, or Reaction.
- No Concentration. Your Concentration is broken.
- Speechless. You can’t speak.
- Surprised. If you’re Incapacitated when you roll Initiative, you have Disadvantage on the roll.
So you're stealing a turn from an enemy (or every enemy in a 60ft cone who fails their saving throw), and giving your entire party advantage on attacks against them, and disrupting any spells they were focusing on, and giving them all disadvantage on any number of Fireballs or other spells with a strength/dexterity save, and since they can't take reactions your party has freedom of movement over the battlefield.
I'm not necessarily saying it's perfectly balanced; that's what the UA process is for. But Mind Blast could absolutely trivialize a major combat encounter if you play it right.
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For me a lot of the appeal of 2024 True Strike is just extra radiant damage. Using Intelligence instead of Strength or Dexterity is going to be a trade off on most melee builds, but getting an extra couple d6 is nothing to scoff at, especially against undead (and zombies have like 8 AC anyway, so you’re basically guaranteed to hit). And, you could still use your weapon mastery with the attack.
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Maybe not what you had in mind, but Slaadi could work really well. There’s several varieties so you can ramp up the threat and keep things fresh over several encounters, and they’ve got a good blend of melee and magic attacks that feel comparable to the Predators.
You could use the tadpoles as a little jump scare like the Alien/AVP movies, or put them in your players so there’s a ticking clock to escape and find a cure.
The idea of Slaadi being chaotic works well too—there’s no grand design here, it’s just fun for them to whisk you off to another planet and hunt you.