Rend (20 Fury): All enemies in melee range take 210% weapon damage as physical Bleed damage over the next 3 seconds.
Rend is your first easy-to-get Bleed effect in the game, and it’s a real doozy- by pausing a moment to spin in a circle, your Barbarian inflicts damage over time in the form of a Bleed on all enemies within melee range. This can be horrifyingly useful or horrifyingly pointless depending on the situation- if you have a way to make sure the enemies are swarming around you and don’t have a way to simply kill them outright, Rend is very useful. This gets especially highlighted in games with large parties, as the monsters get more durable and your attacks don’t improve any. Against single targets, Rend can still be a worthwhile use of your Fury if you’re fighting a boss. That said, it’s really inferior to the other Secondary skills if you could instead just kill things outright with one of them- that results in you taking less damage after all. On the other hand, there are some fun things you can do with Bleed effects...
Ravage (20 Fury): All enemies in 17 yards take 210% weapon damage as physical Bleed damage over the next 3 seconds.
Ravage makes Rend just more of what it already is- again, useless if you can’t get enough stuff near you, and inadequate if you could have just killed it instead. A bit stronger, though, given it can hit things that are charging into melee with you.
Blood Lust (20 Fury):
All enemies in melee range take 210% weapon damage as physical Bleed
damage over the next 3 seconds. You gain as Life 9% of the damage they
take.
Blood Lust makes Rend completely worth it in nearly any situation. There are a relatively limited number of ways of regaining your lost Life, after all, and since you’re a melee specialist, anything that improves that is good. Blood Lust just makes it that much better by improving your Life regain when you’re surrounded by more stuff that wants to kill you. Not terribly useful against single enemies, though.
Lacerate (20 Fury): All enemies in melee range take 270% weapon damage as physical Bleed damage over the next 3 seconds.
Lacerate makes Rend worthwhile in nearly every situation, ramping its damage up to Smash levels with much more ease of application. Additionally, it then becomes worthwhile in a killing things sense- since you can reliably kill things with it and focus on the biggest of the nearby baddies. Sadly, this does nothing worth speaking of to improve Rend for single-target application.
Mutilate (20 Fury): All enemies in melee range take 350% weapon damage as physical Bleed damage over the next 5 seconds.
Mutilate is a strange sort of rune- and stands as a counterpoint to Lacerate. Where Lacerate improves the damage dealt per application of Rend, Mutilate increases the duration while keeping the amount of damage over a given period of time the same. What this means is that while Mutilate does only moderately more damage per use than Lacerate, you will only need to fire it every 5 seconds instead of every 3 if you’re trying to maintain the Bleed. Because the Rend bleeding damage doesn’t stack with multiple shots of Rend, this makes Mutilate a very cost-efficient way of generating damage, if you happen to run low on Fury a lot.
Bloodbath (20 Fury): All
enemies in melee range take 210% weapon damage as physical Bleed damage
over the next 3 seconds. Any enemy that dies while under this effect
afflict all enemies within 10 yards of their death with 60% weapon
damage as physical Bleed damage over the next 3 seconds.
Bloodbath comes in alongside Cleave/Rupture as one of your premier ways of dealing excessively spreading damage, and does it even more effectively- provided you’re maintaining the bleed effect. Because the effect spreads to things near the enemy when they die, you can use it with a knockback effect or alongside allies- or even on fleeing foes- in ways that, while unreliable, are pretty awesome. Sadly, making sure that everything you kill is bleeding at the time is still difficult, so even with Bloodbath, Rend remains a skill specially for those who can carefully time and manage their skill use.
