Diablo III- Skills Article XX: The Barbarian, Tactics Skill- War Cry

War Cry (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 20% for 60 seconds.  Generates 30 Fury.

Many battle commanders will give a call to arms when they want their allies to prepare to fight.  War Cry is essentially the opposite of both that -and- Threatening Shout- as corny as it is, War Cry is a call to armor.  The long duration of War Cry gives you a lot more leeway on keeping it active than the other long-duration Barbarian skills, and this is a very good thing- as with Threatening Shout, suddenly finding yourself without the effects of War Cry can bring you from ‘winning ‘ to ‘dead’ in an alarmingly short amount of time.  Sadly, this skill is much less useful for the solo-ing Barbarian, but despite that, it is by no means useless.

Hardened Wrath (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 40% for 60 seconds.  Generates 30 Fury.

Hardened Wrath is a simple, useful improvement to War Cry, and can really keep your party up and fighting for a lot longer- as long as the main enemy assault isn’t magical.  Armor, sadly, does little against most magical assaults, so investing in this rune may or may not turn out to be a wasted resource slot- that 20% increase is often plenty on its own.

Charge! (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 20% for 60 seconds.  Generates 60 Fury.

Charge!, the first rune to have punctuation in it, really deserves its exclamation point.  While it doesn’t in any way improve the functions of War Cry that most people are going to focus on, it makes the 30-second cooldown really worthwhile: 60 Fury is going to refill a huge chunk if not all of your Fury orb, and combining it with the right Fury-consuming skills will let you wreak all sorts of havoc.  It’s just a pity it can’t be used with Dread Bomb.

Invigorate (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 20% for 60 seconds, and grant the same targets a 10% increase in maximum life and regeneration of (scaling) up to 310 Life per second.  Generates 30 Fury.

Invigorate is an almost hilariously powerful rune for War Cry, since it powers up Life and Life Recovery to an almost absurd level- as long as you and your allies aren’t getting yourselves killed swiftly with just War Cry, stacking Invigorate onto it leaves you with no worries of sudden death from anything you should expect to fight.  It’s quite possible that outside of corner cases, Invigorate is the best rune there is for War Cry.  It certainly will make your allies happy to have an Invigorate on them, there’s no way to doubt that.

Veteran’s Warning (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 20% for 60 seconds, and increase the dodge chance of all affected characters by 15% .  Generates 30 Fury.

Veteran’s Warning will make anyone who pumps their Dexterity (namely Monks and Demon Hunters) immensely happy- as they already tend to have good Dodge chances and this rune just ups that even further.  This rune will benefit any class, but unless you’re in a party where the rest of it is all Dexterity classes, it’s probably not going to beat Invigorate as an option.  If you are in such a party, though, sit back and watch the demons whiff.

Impunity (Cooldown 30 Seconds): Increase the armor of yourself and all allies within 50 yards by 20% for 60 seconds and increases the Resistances of all targets by 50%.  Generates 30 Fury.

Impunity is really only of use if you’re finding spell damage to be horribly devastating.  Most of the time, this isn’t going to be that big of a deal, but if you somehow know you’re about to start facing a bunch of enemies with the Arcane keyword, you want to swap to this rune.  Sadly, such encounters are virtually all random and since changing runes on a skill triggers its cooldown, you’re really not going to find yourself using this much.  Kind of unfortunate.