Diablo III- Skills Article X: The Barbarian, Defensive Skill- Leap

Leap (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 8 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage and are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Leap is a good old one, a skill long used by Barbarians to not only join and escape battle, but ‘cheat’ terrain a bit and pull other amusing hijinks.  While not always the most useful of skills, particularly given the competition it gets from other Defensive skills, it brings a decent side of offense to the table for such a skill.  If you’re looking for a Defensive skill that involves less crowd-control and more saving your own bacon while flicking out some extra damage, Leap is a good choice.  Or if you just want to imitate Tigger or a ball of Flubber.

Iron Impact (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 8 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage and are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds.  Your armor is increased to 4x its normal value for 4 seconds after you land.  Generates 15 Fury.

Iron Impact is a rune that makes this into a truly impressive defense skill, as well as enhancing the utility of Leap.  While initially it doesn’t seem useful, since most of the things where you land are going to be stunned for almost the length of the armor boost, it grants you impressive protection against ranged weapon attacks- and against dashing or teleporting attacks from enemies that you are trying to escape so you can get a breather.

Launch (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location and slow all enemies within 8 yards of your launch point by 60% for 3 seconds, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 8 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage and are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Launch turns Leap into a truly powerful escape skill, a golden option for times when you’re surrounded- whether because you need to get away, or because an ally needs help across the screen right now and you don’t want to just drag more monsters onto them.  It can also be used for some rather silly-looking but potentially very effective crowd control.

Toppling Impact (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 8 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage and are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds and suffer knockback.  Generates 15 Fury.

If you’re inclined to use your Defensive skill to protect your buddies, then Toppling Impact makes Leap into an excellent tool for this.  An ally getting dogpiled by melee monsters (especially a Wizard without Blur)?  Hop on over and spread things away to give them a breather.  While it can do terrible things to your ability to kill stuff, this is the -Defensive- skill slot, so you should consider this if you have a lot of non-melee friends you group up with.

Call of Arreat (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 16 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage, are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds, and get pulled to you.  Generates 15 Fury.

If, on the other hand, your preferred method of defending your ally is to pull everything off of them so it can be squished in a small region- or if you like leaping directly into battle with large masses of enemies at the start of combat- Call of Arreat is the Leap you want.  Also useful as a trade-up from Wrenching Smash if you like the effect but want to try using a variation.

Death From Above (Cooldown 10 Seconds): Leap to a selected location, bypassing terrain and enemies.  Enemies within 8 yards of your landing spot take 85% weapon damage and are slowed by 60% for 3 seconds.  There is a 100% chance of stunning enemies you land on for 3 seconds.  Generates 15 Fury.

Death From Above, aside from being an awesome name that also gets applied to when you use jump jets to launch a mech into the air and land onto another one, is the Leap of choice for stopping things cold when you really need it.  Essentially a very focused version of Ground Stomp with the leap function tacked onto it, DFA will let you make absolutely sure that that thing beating on your friend or Follower stops it now.  This is most useful against bosses (other then Mephisto), particularly when your ally, for whatever reason, is drawing more aggro than you.  When dealing with numerous mobs, this is not as useful- but it still is an interesting hybrid of Leap and Ground Stomp.