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I personally think it will be much better as an actual passive. Maybe you could pick both or choose which you summon if you invest in both skills. I definately think that it should not only add damage but add that effect and extra damage when you blow them up.

I think a good idea would be like fire mongrels get extra fire damage on melee and apply a dot (show monsters burning when its applied) when they attack. When you sacrifice them, they explode with a fiery blast, damaging enemies and also inflicting a fire dot. These guys would help a lot in big battles with strong monsters and bosses. Powerful in single target, but has aoe backup.

Locust mongrels would be aoe based. When they strike it inflicts with locust plague, hitting the target and then passing to nearby enemies. Very good for big groups and bosses with a lot of cronies. On explosion it would emit a big blast of locusts that infect and spread. It would eventually be like a locust swarm nova.

That's just a few ideas though. I'm insterested to see these bigger versions, do we have any pics of those or have we not seen that yet? It sounds like it would be sweet.

The Monk was just released at Blizzcon 09. Confirmed officially.

I just see a lot of problems with this system. Here is my two cents.

First off, if 3 globes is the max, they already botched the Barb, especially if an ability like WW costs 3 globes on its own. Sure, swarms would probably give you a nearly endless supply of fury, but what about harder individual monsters. And what happens if you get hit a lot harder? Will amount of damage reflect fury gained? What about bosses, and those special monsters that were supposed to make the game more dynamic?

Lets take for example the Berserkers. They hit pretty hard, but avoiding them is the trick. These are something you would want to get rid of quickly, but if you are trying to avoid his hits then you are just going to have to normal melee him to death? That sounds weak. What happens when you come up against certain mob combos, such as Berserkers/Cultists in the gameplay demo? You want to get rid of those cultists before they become much more powerful and get overwhelmed by a ton of heavy hitters, but now you can't just instantly react with a leap attack to smash them? No, now you gotta slap some guys and get slapped around before you can actually retaliate with some powerful attacks another class would be able to use right off the bat.

And what about bosses? Sure as a Barb you could take way more hits than a Wizard or Witch Doctor, but do you really want to be taking its damage on purpose to gain specials faster? If you don't then you have to melee him to death before you can get out a special. If you do get hit, I would surely hope you get a LOT more fury because of the power and nature of the hit so you can retaliate effectively.

I'm sorry, but I just can't see this working very well with Diablo unless we see some major improvements to the system at Blizzcon 09. Fury/Rage systems work pretty well on MMOs for a few reasons. For on, the classes that use them were generally being healed constantly or had abilities that generated a lot of rage easily. Also, MMOs have a tenancy to be much slower paced than a game such as Diablo. I won't lose hope in the Barb till I really get a chance to play it after release, but I truly hope by Blizzcon this system has been truly fixed or just trashed for the classic mana methods.

Honestly, I have thought long and hard about this system, and I see places where it will succeed and places where it will phail. I think it is way to early to really even give an opinion at this point, its time I wait patiently for Blizzcon09 to see what really happens.