CAVE_DETAILED creatures having no shops is a serious stumbling block on a young naga adventurer's path towards not dying, but on the plus side, tail slaps are pretty darn useful.
Even though they are only a couple times more powerful than a regular kick, their ability to latch on makes tail slaps devastating in the right situations - check out what happened to a dwarven werewolf that was stupid enough to attack me while in dwarf form.
Ouch.
Before that, though, on the trip to the lair, I had a fight with a giant thrips that took an annoyingly long period of time to win. Granted, I wasn't exactly going for the deathblows on purpose, but tail-wrestling with a giant critter is not nearly as potent, although the shake attacks did rip limbs open, and I was able to "fight dirty" by scratching his eye out. Eventually it gave in to pain, so I just smashed its head in with a single blow from my hammer... which is weird, because I was trying a trick of "tail slap - latch on - immobilize the enemy, and smack it with my hammer" trick before that, and it wasn't doing much besides bruising, but as soon as I get him down on the ground, it's instant kill time.
EDIT: Alligators are deadly - they can basically do the same thing to me that I was doing to everything else. Nearly lost an arm and had to run for it. I was getting faint, but the fact that I'm just plain faster meant I could fast travel and heal.
I got ambushed by a cheetah on the way back to town to report my heroic limb-ripping kill of the dwarf-form werecritter. It turns out that if I target a paw or a tail, I can rip the whole limb off, and then throw it back at the assailant, which is sort of funny.
The only problem is I'm flying skyhigh in wrestling while my hammernaga skill isn't going anywhere.