Diablo III- Skills Article XXIV: The Barbarian, Passive Skills Part One

The Barbarian has a few oddball passives, but most of them are geared towards one of a few things: being the tank, raging like a madman, scoring critical hits everywhere, and making things pay for trying to hurt you.

Pound of Flesh: When you have a chance of generating a health globe, that chance is increased by 25%.  You heal twice the normal amount of Life from health globes.

While Pound of Flesh is a potent skill indeed, there are very few things that truly complement it.  Of the Barbarian skills, only Birthright for Hammer of the Ancients does anything at all with health globes, and that’s only a modest chance of generating them.  What’s more, pretty much the only thing equipment does about health globes is make them heal more- just like Pound of Flesh does, only less effectively.  Frankly, this skill is only worth the slot if you see a lot of health globes for some reason and don’t really have adequate defenses.  There are better ways to keep your Life up later on, so switch this one out fairly quick.

Ruthless: Your chance of a critical hit is increased by 5%.  Your critical hit damage is increased by 50%.

This is one of the golden skills for Barbarians- nobody who is running a critical hit Barbarian should be without this skill.  There are so many Barbarian skills that give massive love to critical hits that you may even want this skill if you’re not focused on critical hits, just because you can benefit so much in the right situations.  At any rate, this skill is aces for critical hit monkeys, and nobody else actually hates it- there are better things for other builds, but they mostly come around later on.

Nerves of Steel: Your armor is increased by your Vitality.

This essentially makes your Vitality into a second Strength score as far as your Armor rating is concerned.  If you don’t have a shield, you want this to make sure you survive to get later skills.  If you do have a shield, you want this to be an even more stable tank.  Frankly, you just want this- unless you’re a critical hit monkey, because Ruthless.  It can’t hurt to mention the huge amount of the non-Legendary gear that has Stamina increases as part of its benefit on the side.  Just don’t try to invest directly in it- while increasing your Life and Armor at the same time is nice for reducing the damage you take, it’s just not as nice as making sure you kill things so they stop dealing damage to you at all.

Weapons Master: You gain a benefit depending on the weapon you wield in your main hand: Swords and daggers deal 15% more damage, axes and maces have a +10% bonus to their critical hit chance, polearms and spears attack speed is improved by 10%, and Mighty weapons generate 3 Fury for each thing you hit with them.

This skill is perhaps even more ubiquitously useful than Nerves of Steel, since Critical Hit monkeys will love it also.  Because of this skill, crit monkeys will likely be wandering around with axes and clubs, and tanks will probably be poking around with spears a lot (since there are no one-handed polearms).  Other Barbarians have to decide what they want more- Fury (mighty weapons) or raw damage output (two-handed swords).  It’s possible you might see a Barbarian wielding a dagger, but even the benefit of Weapons Master isn’t enough to really make this worthwhile- daggers have crummy reach and damage and rely on a high attack speed- and Barbarians really don’t want that out of their weapon very much.  They can pump their own attack speed perfectly well with just their skills.  The benefits do overlap- a Mighty mace generates extra fury and has a higher critical rate- but there are some limitations- namely, the lack of two-handed Mighty swords, Mighty polearms, and other such things.