Diablo III- Skills Article XXV: The Barbarian, Passive Skills Part Two

Berserker Rage: You deal 25% extra damage while at maximum Fury.

This is the second oddball passive skill for Barbarians, and it’s not hard to see why.  Since the Barbarian is angling to constantly spend Fury, a lot of Barbarians won’t be able to benefit from this skill much, if at all.  It -is- possible to have a Barbarian who sticks at or near maximum Fury very frequently, but it requires some frankly odd skill choices and a few gaping holes (not using Rage Skills much, for instance).  Surprisingly, it’s more useful than Pound of Flesh, but you’re not going to have four passive skill slots ever (nevermind before you reach the sixth passive skill), so this skill is unlikely to ever see much use.  Which is a pity, because it’s conceptually kind of cool.

Inspiring Presence: Your shouts are: Battle Rage, Threatening Shout, War Cry.  The duration of your shout skills is doubled.  When you use a shout skill, you heal 60% of your maximum Life over the next 60 seconds.

This is mostly a utility skill for Shout barbarians, who are very likely to be the tank.  Having doubled duration on the shouts is very kind, allowing you a lot more management leeway on your support skills.  The healing ability seems negligible at first, until you realize that combining it with Invigorate gives you an insane total of constant regeneration.  Even using it with Threatening Shout promises to help you out of a lot of holes, and critical hit barbarians may want to try this with Battle Rage just to ensure the critical hit bonus sticks around a long time without maintenance.  Of course, there will always be some barbarians who prefer hurling an ax around to screaming in their enemies’ (or allies’) faces, and that’s fine too- just keep in mind that if you have Weapon Throw, this passive is meaningless to you.

Bloodthirst: You gain 3% of the damage you deal as Life.

If you happen to have, for some insane reason, been actually using Pound of Flesh until Bloodthirst came up, this is unquestionably the skill to replace it with.  Since it’s only dependent on you hitting things, and not hitting things in the right way to get a random chance to make them drop something that you then have to go pick up, the undoubtedly smaller amount of Life regained per batch is completely not a drawback- particularly since you hit things a -lot- more often than you grab health globes.  Sadly, most Barbarians don’t have a lot of room for this once their preferred passive skills unlock, but if you’re stuck for what to put in your third Passive slot, you can always rely on Bloodthirst to be a good choice.  Not an amazing choice- but a good one.