In the early days of progression servers, Gorge of King Xorbb is a busy place and hard to get a camp. Chasm crawlers are a good alternative for kiters that wanted to xp and get the caster loot from the gorge because you can zone out of the the gorge to East Karana and there is ample supply of the snakes to kite.
Pull them off to the side as they will assist even if the assister is low level to you.
For the cash-starved, the loot is decent for vendoring as reported by Lovejoy in 2000.
The poison will only be a factor on a progression server or if you are choosing to play with no modern gear.
Kiters that cannot fd, can always zone into the gorge to drop aggro.
As a plus, if you are really just waiting for the Evil Eye camps in the gorge to open up, this is at least a productive use of your time in the teen levels while you are waiting around.
Yeah they can hit and have strong poison - so CHARM them! I find a dark blue, charm with 70CHA, target another dark blue anything, DoT, med. When he's done I target a light blue (health is usually low) and order another attack, DoT, med. Orginal creature is killed and 2nd one attacked is <30% everytime. Snare/melee/DoT/DD - your choice. EASY exp. Should end up with full hp/80m. I did this from 15 to 17 with my HFL DRU.
As lvl 14 mage, i hunt them as they con blue. Be carefull as even if their max level is supposed to be 13, they hit very hard. I had a hard time to kill some of these beasts , even with my water pet.
I had to revive my pet 2 , and nuke the chasm crawler as mad with my spell to kill it. One time, one of these kill my pet very quickly as i did not nuke it myself and let the pet do the work.
These snakes have a pretty powerful poison for their level. I would suggest that you don't kill them unless you can cure poison, have a high poison resistance, or a ton of hit points. However, when you do kill them, the loot is not horrible. Often they have giant snake fangs (sell for 4+ gp, and are nice for brand new casters), snake eggs, giant snake fang (not worth the carry weight), and poison sacs. These are sought after by rogues. You may be able to sell off some poison sacs to a rogue who doesn't want to spend a lot of time on these.