Diablo III- Skills Article XIII: The Barbarian, Might Skill- Ancient Spear

Ancient Spear (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw a spear that deals 185% weapon damage, slows what it hits by 60% briefly, and pulls whatever it hits back to you.  Generates 15 Fury.

Ancient Spear is the Barbarian’s second real answer to enemies who attack from afar.  Not only does it deal considerable damage (especially for a two-handed-weapon Barbarian), it also drags the enemy, should they survive, back to you.  Like most Pull effects it won’t work on the larger boss enemies, but that’s not much of a drawback considering how much it injures them anyways.  You do need to be careful that nothing runs in between you and your target, but as long as you’ve decently cleared out the melee opponents first it shouldn’t be an issue.  This also saves you running down fleeing enemies- and can make dealing with Treasure Demons that much easier to boot.

Grappling Hooks (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw three spears that deal 185% weapon damage, slow what they hit by 60% briefly, and pull whatever they hit back to you.  Generates 15 Fury.

Grappling Hooks uses a pattern familiar to anyone who’s played a scrolling-shooter or a variety of other games before- instead of launching a single spear forwards, it launches a sixty-degree ‘spread’ of three spears- each of which does exactly what the single spear did.  Except in very special cases (exploding enemies) this is never a bad thing.  Even if you don’t care at all about getting the extra two enemies near you, or if all but one spear is blocked by an enemy standing next to you, you’re still dishing out some nice damage.

Skirmish (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw a spear that deals 185% weapon damage, slows what it hits by 60% briefly, and pulls whatever it hits back to you.  Generates 30 Fury.

Another rune for the Fury-starved, Skirmish just isn’t much of an improvement.  It’s slightly better than Foot of the Mountain, but only because the cooldown on Ancient Spear is shorter.  In fact, for keeping Fury up out of battle, it’s less useful, since not hitting anything with Ancient Spear means not gaining any Fury, and many destructible objects are immune to Ancient Spear.  Still, like Foot of the Mountain, if you find yourself losing Fury like you keep it in a colendar, you might want to try this.

Dread Spear (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw a spear that deals 185% weapon damage and heals you by 60% of that damage, slows what it hits by 60% briefly, and pulls whatever it hits back to you.  Generates 15 Fury.

For those of us who can’t keep their Life orb even half full, Dread Spear eases things a little bit.  The amount of Life Drain on this rune is staggering, particularly given the near-200% damage that Ancient Spear dishes out.  People who like two-handed weapons and tend to mix it up with things that rip holes in them will adore this rune, since it makes Ancient Spear into a combination heal and haul.

Harpoon (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw a piercing spear that deals 185% weapon damage, slows what it hits by 60% briefly, and pulls everything it hits back to you.  Generates 15 Fury.

A useful alternative to Grappling Hooks for those who mostly care about the ability to make things Get Over Here, Harpoon can sometimes net you a pile of up to a dozen enemies- because it pierces.  Really useful when the enemy caster hides far away while raining things on you as his melee friends get in your way, Harpoon is likely to be your later-level choice for Ancient Spear for quite a while.

Rage Flip (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Throw a spear that deals 213% weapon damage, slows what it hits by 60% briefly, and sends whatever it hits flying away from you.  Generates 15 Fury.

Rage Flip is a particularly weird rune, because it turns Ancient Spear completely on its head.  If you find that you’re only using Ancient Spear to tag things that die from it anyway, go ahead and use Rage Flip, but it’s unlikely that that’s why you picked Ancient Spear.  This is one of those runes that exists only for corner-cases- those few enemies that you don’t want near your allies, don’t want near you, and don’t want to just stay away from.  There aren’t many of those, so there’s not much point to Rage Flip.