Diablo III- Skills Article XVIII: The Barbarian, Tactics Skill- Threatening Shout

Threatening Shout (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage for 15 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

For those of you who want to be a battle commander rather than a simple raging beast, flurry of blows, or storm of dead bodies packed with explosives, Threatening Shout is here to turn your Barbarian into a battlefield commander.  Or commando, I’m not sure which.  Threatening Shout is a skill that benefits your party- without getting any better or worse no matter what number of allies you have, from zero to whatever the maximum is (I think five- Leah, Tyrael, and three player allies).  Like the other Shouts and certain other Barbarian skills (Hello, Rend), Threatening Shout is best used by those who can keep a monitor on it and use it every time it comes up.  Without that, the effect becomes unreliable and players will often have strange moments where they suddenly start taking more (or less) damage and that can screw up their ability to judge when they should stay in combat and when to back off a bit.  So if you’re no good at that, you should skip this and other skills like it.

Intimidate (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage and have their movement reduced by 30% for 15 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Intimidate is an amazing improvement for Threatening Shout, turning it into an excellent control tool and letting the Barbarian give allies a huge chance to do whatever they need to- be that blast more, back off, patch wounds, or pummel everything.  If you’re going to use Threatening Shout a lot, there’s very little reason not to stick this rune on.

Falter (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage for 15 seconds and have their attack speed reduced by 15% for 5 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Boosting the ability of Threatening Shout to cut incoming damage shouldn’t be needed- but just in case it is, there’s Falter.  Turning Threatening Shout almost into a magic ‘off’ button for the enemy offense can do amazing things for the survivability of your Barbarian and their allies- but keep in mind that if you ever get in danger with it active, failing to trigger the shout even once is likely to be messily fatal.

Grim Harvest (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage and have a 15% chance to drop extra treasure for 15 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Grim Harvest is, in a way, a callback to the old Diablo II Magic-Find Barbarian.  Part of a very small group of skills and runes, this is the way to make sure that you’re getting stuff to sell when you find a merchant.  Since it doesn’t actually affect battle tactics, there’s not much to say other than that it’s kind of a cool idea that you scare people into dropping stuff.

Demoralize (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage for 15 seconds and must attack you for the next 3 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Demoralize is the tanker rune for Threatening Shout, and serves its purpose quite well.  Shield-using Barbarians are going to love the sound out of Demoralizing Shout with this rune, and for good reason- it’s virtually the only guaranteed way to pull attention off of your allies.  Of course, using this skill when you’re not ready to be dogpiled is pretty thoroughly fatal- or rather it would be if you hadn’t just cut the damage of everything you taunted.  What a boss skill.

Terrify (Cooldown 15 Seconds): All enemies within 25 yards when you use this skill deal 20% less damage for 15 seconds and each such enemy has a 35% chance of fleeing in terror for 2.5 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Terrify makes Demoralize into the exact opposite of Demoralize- rather than being a panic button that forces things to ignore your allies, it attempts to force things to ignore your whole party- by fleeing.  Since the effect has only a chance of happening on any given target, though, it really isn’t what it could be.  This relegates Terrify to a tool for surviving a protracted battle with a mass of minions- since anything that flees is dealing no damage instead of reduced damage.  Not terribly useful.