Hello, fellow Conanians!
Just a quick public service announcement for those who haven’t tried it yet:
The new snake pet is pretty cool. I levelled a greater snake (the battlepass variant) to level 20, and it served me rather well. Its stats at level 20 are as follows:
The stats are with 0 points in Authority. With well-trained, it should turn into a monster. Okay, giant snakes already are monsters, so… it should turn into a meta-monster.
I had Skelos Cultist Armor on me that gave my followers a 25% damage bonus.
It took 55 seconds to kill the Red Mother and survived with 73% health.
Some pros:
- The snake has a very, very consistent attack pattern and apparently cannot be staggered or knocked down. That makes it great to fight creatures that stagger a lot. My snake almost (almost!) defeated a Rockslide on its own.
- It only attacks every four seconds or so, but then with a very hard hit, e. g. 765 against the Red Mother in the aforementioned test. The “Damage Meter” addon says it did 153.39 DPS against the Red Mother, which is not spectacular, but still great.
- The attacks deal stacking poison, which seems to be identical to poisoned weapons, but is on a different track, so that you can have multiple poisons running on a target.
- The attack has a good range, I’d say farther than spears. That allows it to attack across some barriers.
- The attacks have a cone- or box-shaped AoE effect. If fighting humans, it usually hits 2-3 at once.
Some cons:
- Its attacks hit hard and consistently, but they are very, very slow. It takes some seconds before its first attack.
- The attacks deal more damage than many creatures have in health. Combined with the slow attack pattern, its DPS drops significantly when fighting low-health creatures, even to a point where it doesn’t have any impact on a fight.
- It moves unbelievably slowly.
The Red Mother may be the creature it is most useful against, as dragons are not immune to poison and have a lot of knockbacks.
It was helpful in the fight against Thag, but takes too much damage to deal with him alone. It’s really good at wiping out his skeleton minions, though.
As a comparison:
This lovely creature - my most powerful human thrall in full shieldwright epic strength armor with a Momentum mace - took 59 seconds for the same fight, had 152.42 DPS, but survived with 90% health:
Overall, I’d say the snake pet doesn’t outshine endgame thralls with endgame gear. But it’s relatively easy to get and can shine for some specialty uses such as killing the Red Mother. It might be good for purges - haven’t tested that yet.
Neither follower had any potion or special foods buffs running.
