Rive Double Slash confusion

Sentinel
1

TLDR below.
So I saw that double slash skips the third strike, and at first I thought “why in the world would I skip the double damage hit? the DPS would drop a lot” so I’ve played for several hours with and without the third strike and it definitely makes a difference in DPS.

So maybe it’s an attack speed thing? There is a slightly longer pause between strike 3 and back to 1, than between 1 and 2, or between 2 and back to 1 if you skip the 3rd strike. So average attack speed is higher??? But strike 3 is still a hit and even with the teeny tiny extra pause the average difference in attack speed seems like it’s so small that it wouldn’t make up for what I am certain is a pretty big DPS drop. Especially when strike 3 can hit a lot more enemies in bigger groups.

I’ve been reading though all the passives and skills, and searching for any forum posts on why I would want to do this and I can’t find anything in the passives and skills or in forums posts other than some 3-ish year old posts about ignite.

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| TLDR |
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My assumption / questions: it seems like skipping the third strike only makes any sense if your build focuses on +% chance to apply an ailment on hit kinds of things, but even then, I can’t find any good explanations about whether that’s true and why, or not true.

  1. is it just an attack speed thing and I’m not seeing the other skills that would make that awesome or I suck at arpg math and can’t figure it out… and/or…

  2. is there some other reason I would want to spend a point on this skill, that justifies the DPS reduction on Rive?

2

If Rive is primary source of damage, absolutely want 3rd hit.

If it is used in a support role (Pull in enemies, refill mana, shred armor) - 3rd strike slows it down and you only care about speed.

3

Just getting to the “skip 3rd strike” node requires you to put points in nodes that increase the attack speed and grant armor shred to the 1st and 2nd hits. That pretty much sums up why you’d want to skip it, you just want Rive for utility and rely on something else for damage, like Healing Hands.