Sirian's First Impression

[Ruvanal]

And you can switch them out pretty freely. It's not the least bit restrictive. There is a cooldown (5 sec?), and I don't think (haven't tried) you can change them in combat. I've not run up against the cooldown anytime I wanted to change skills.

That's another big change since the last time I played too. It used to be a 30s cooldown on swapping skills. Which meant you put your hotkeys up and you used them. And like I said the skills weren't nearly as refined as they appear to be now, which is good. Cleave was doing well over 100 damage a hit when I was around L10 and it was completely spammable and would hit mutliple mobs if there were. I was watching my friend play the monk and didn't see much more than a 50 or so for damages at L10 in the current build.

This is good. Like I said the barb while satisfying was boring because it was cleave watch stuff splat, and then buff shout every now and then. The runes being back make things much more interesting, the 5s vs the 30s cooldown on skill swaps is better (though again in D2 I was using 15+ hotkeyed skills on several classes, the necro of course using more because every curse had excellent situational uses) so again, 5 is limited.

I'll play the beta again at some point before the 15th to get a bit more feel for the changes, which again I'm encouraged by over what I played. But again, to my original question, what does cleave do now that makes people not just spam it exclusively?

From the Beta Patch 16 notes:
The cooldown on swapping skills while in Normal difficulty has been decreased from 15 seconds to 5 seconds.

I am guessing that they want you to swap out skills more frequently at first to try for their overall feel. By the end of normal most players will likely be settling in on the few that they will use most of the time and the shift to a 15 second cooldown on will not be as bad of an impact with more skills that can still be available while the cooldown is in effect.