No barb changes in 1.4, except blood hatred:
BLOOD HATRED:
Now requires a single melee hit to activate
Duration scaling increased by 100%
Enemy fire, cold and lightning resistance reduction increased by 50%
Life on attack now has a Base Level synergy
Health degeneration is now a fixed 2% of maximum life per second
Now decreases weapon physical damage by 50% + 10% per skill level
This is clearly tweaked for pure elemental builds as it adds negative enhanced damage, quickly nulifies skill %ed.
To sum this up, degen is weaker, duration is very long (buffs), pierce now smaxed goes to around 30% (buff but still average), life on hit is greatly reduced, it used to be slvl synergy, now base points, big nerf. And finally and probably most importantly you don't need to hit xx times to charge it, one hit maxes it out. Before 1 hit = 1 slvl worth of bonus, so having slvl 70 of the skill in endgame, required 70 hits to get full bonus, paired with short duration, skill was very difficult to use. Now 1 hit, and bonus is active.
Here example of maxed skill on high level character:
Overall it has potential, but comes at quite heavy damage penalty, and most powerful aspect of the skill = life on hit, is reduced quite hard. 600 is of course nothing to ignore, but it is no longer 2-3k like it used to be which was absolutely crazy, if you could somehow live with this annoying windup.
Other thing is, if we are at elemental builds, using ele weapons, they were buffed too, 30% attribute scaling buff and procs were buffed.
All of this doesn't affect original build since we are phys based, this would require not only go with elemental base axe but also use kraken stance oskill, which changed build entirely.