Diablo III- Skills Article XIX: The Barbarian, Tactics Skill- Battle Rage

Battle Rage (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 15% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.

Ah yes.  Critical hit monkeys rejoice, your Tactics Skill sits right here.  Look, it’s mad.  How cute.  While the bonus doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s easy to keep up permanently, and comes alongside a nice fat bonus to all your damage as well.  There are very few characters who won’t enjoy using Battle Rage- and those who don’t only don’t enjoy it because there’s something else in this slot they need badly (Tanks with Demoralize, for instance).  As long as you can remember to keep this skill up, it’s just plain nice to have.

Marauder’s Rage (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 30% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.

Marauder’s Rage is probably the simplest rune in the game- it just makes Battle Rage even more so.

Ferocity (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 15% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.  Each time you get a critical hit, extend this duration by 2 seconds.

Ferocity is the skill rune to make this critmonkey skill even more critmonkey....ish.  In this case, not by improving your critical hits or their chance of occurring, but rather by rewarding you for going so far out of your way to get numbers that really ought to have exclamation points after them.  With any luck, a critical hit Barbarian toting around this rune will only have to use Ferocity once each time they step out of town and into the field.  After that, the hits should just power the darn thing.

Swords to Ploughshares (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 15% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.  Critical hits you score while under this buff have up to a 5% chance to generate extra health globes.

Of course, if you’re a two-weapon critmonkey Barbarian, you have no shield.  And that makes your defenses just a touch less happy than they could be.  On the other hand, you’re great at dishing out critical hits.  So..... why not take this rune?  Swords to Ploughshares (a bizarre name for a Barbarian rune that hinges on stabbing/bashing/chopping people where they’re most vulnerable) helps you generate even more health orbs, letting you make up for the extra damage you take while still pumping out the critical hits.

Into the Fray (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 15% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.  Critical hits you score while under this buff have a chance to generate 15 extra Fury.

It’s also possible to use the Battle Rage rune slot to improve your ability to generate Fury.  Not that critical-hit Barbarians are any shorter on Fury than other barbarians- but sometimes you just want the extra ensurance.  Or the extra uses of Hammer of the Ancients.  Whichever.

Bloodshed (20 Fury): Increase your damage by 15% and your critical hit chance by 3% for 30 seconds.  Critical hits you score under this buff have a chance to cause the enemy they hit to spray blood all over, dealing 20% of the damage they took to all other enemies near them.

Still, nothing beats dishing out massive area-effect damage.  Bloodshed causes just that, turning all enemies into pinatas and your critical strikes into a festival!  Of blood.  You are, after all, a mighty warrior, not a party planner.

Come to think of it though, most Barbarians party pretty hard.....

...anyways, Bloodshed is the area-of-effect rune for Battle Rage, as odd as it may be to have an area-of-effect modification to a self-enhancement buff.  Best used where there are lots of enemies, so change runes before boss fights.