Diablo – How much damage should an end-game barbarian do

There are a few Barbarian skills that charge at enemies and generate fury which should be used often. Leap is one you gain fairly early on, and you can even use it to jump up and down ledges or across chasms where other classes have to run around. You should generally be running ahead of players rather than lagging behind.

Also remember that you can build up Fury just by attacking things like crates. Keep your fury high even without any enemies around so that you're ready to go when you do find something to kill.

Barbarians (and Monks) get a passive 30% damage resistance to make up for their melee natures, and tend to have higher vitality and health than the other classes. Against many enemies, it is the right thing to do to just jump in and start causing havoc. Barbarians are good at distracting enemies while their teammates do damage, so try to focus on that rather than claiming the final blow. You get full experience and drops whether you're the one landing the finishing hit or not.

It's a skill that doesn't work with the usual cast and cooldown mechanic as other skills do. Instead it will activate in 15% of you getting hit by a monster. You'll see that the skill-icon will turn active, but then you'll have to manually activate the skill.

The time-window for activating the skill is also limited. After some time the skill will become inactive again if you didn't chose to activate it.

While it's different from other skills, I personally like the mechanic and the skill already helped me in several situations (surrounded by monsters, this skill can be some sort of "panic-button" that heals you and deals damage in the same turn).

Update: Also note that the skill doesn't have a cooldown. So if you're getting hit a lot, you can potentially trigger this skill quite frequently. Especially if you enable the "Provocation" skill-rune (available at level 52) which increases the chance of activation from 15% to 30%.