There’s already a post talking about how poison based Serpent strike is dead. But with this post I wanted to talk about the primal serpent subskill which takes up 11 points of the Serpent strike tree and how bad that currently is.
Primal serpent is a snake minion which can be procced by Serpent strike, its only attack is a melee attack with 100% poison chance where it looks like it knocks its head against a single enemy that has the same AoE as player basic attack. Meaning it needs to be in melee range to hit anything and is very slow (ie. useless for clearing). It is a minion not a companion, hence it does not benefit from any aspect buffs and 90% of the beastmaster tree. Now let us see its proc rate, 12% chance from killing which is rough but manageable and a whopping 2% from hitting rares/uniques. This horrible proc rate makes it painful for minion builds as it is but there’s more…
Looking at the nodes buffing it, we have first and foremost Guardian spear a must have if you want to spec into Serpent as an actual minion a stackable 65% more damage buff(even if it is only 10 sec) and a heal sounds good on paper… in practice this node is barely visible. There is no indication of the buff or how many stacks you have. In my testing, the damage increase may as well be bugged and not working and is massively unreliable due to the atrocious proc rate as mentioned above.
Vicious strikes gives the minion attack speed and a 30 health on hit which is pretty weak considering 1. Its basic attack barely hits 1 enemy at a time(2 if they are standing on top of each other 2. 30 health per hit is barely a drop for a minion’s hp pool 3. it is blocked from most attack speed nodes like aspects of viper and shark and has less base attack speed than a vine(really a snake slower than a plant?)…
Iron Scales… I don’t get this node, was the plan to make Serpent like a tank for melee/poison serpent strike(RIP). But it has no taunt skill, barely hits enemies and for some reason leaps with you when using Fury leap node(for raptor, saber and wolves). The node seems good for non minion builds that need some defense to keep the snake alive but there’s no reason to…
Emerald Fangs is a decent node, some decent poison chance and fraility is very good utility. However the pathetic range of serpent’s attacks makes it a bad fraility applicator and poor proc chance means it is usually not reliably up on bosses(especially if you have to dodge mechanics like rahyeh pie chart or lagon beams).
I’m still amazed that the entire poison support(poison spit, global dot, plague) nodes for serpent strike got removed over THIS. If you would have told me part of the old serpent strike tree was being removed/reworked I would have instantly assumed the Primal serpent nodes.
Ideas to make it a better skill
Well these are just ideas i’m spitballing, to make the skill better cos I think it does have potential and some may be too much.
- Revamp the minions attacks. This is probably a major change but I believe much needed. Give it a tail swipe attack with AoE(atleast like swipe level of AoE) or a poison spit attack like the mage enemies/raptor a leap attack like Sabetooth’s pounce would also be neat. Have it weave these attacks in between regular auto attacks (like abomination’s soul reave every 3 attacks).
- Increase the proc rate, 2% on rare/boss hit is pretty sad. Make it 10% on kill/hit and nerf Guardian spear if needed.
- About Guardian spear give some way to make the buff noticeable, currently it can only be noticed if it healed the serpent and is invisible if its on full health. Give it some buff icon and also something visual like increased size Raptor already has or a red orb for each stack or something.
- Guardian spear essentialy makes Serpent feel like a pseudo companion, make it so companion related effects will affect the Serpent at 50% (still does not count as a companion).
- Maybe a bit related to my build but I feel the Frostwyrm’s fury node should convert serpent into cold dmg and frostbite from poison chance. Why ? its in the name of the node and there is already a model for it(used for frost wyrm enemies)…
- Iron Scales, if the idea for this was to make snake a tank, give it a taunt on all its attacks like bear roar does. Also make it increase the snake’s size to look like a tank.
- Maybe some synergy with Raptor would be cool(as they are the only two reptilian minions). Something like a node behind Acidic Bile that says Raptor has increased poison chance and acid spit cooldown is halved if you have a Primal serpent active.
