Diablo III- Skills Article CLXXXXVII: Wizard Elective Mode Build Four- Proximation of Doom

Mouse Skills:
Spectral Blade (Deep Cuts)
Frost Nova (Frozen Mist)
Hotbar Skills:
Diamond Skin (Crystal Shell)
Arcane Orb (Arcane Orbit)
Slow Time (Time Warp)
Energy Armor (Prismatic Armor)
Passive Skills:
Blur
Evocation
Arcane Dynamo

Spectral Blade is an obvious choice here, with Deep Cuts attached to provoke much larger amounts of damage, particularly with repeated hits.  Frost Nova makes the mouse skill list because Frozen Mist is going to be an effect you rely on creating every chance you get, so you’re constantly surrounded by an area of chilling damage that both reduces incoming attacks and cuts into your enemies’ Life totals.

Diamond Skin is another clear choice- enhanced with Crystal Shell to ensure it soaks up as much hurt as possible.  With its effect up over one-third of the time, Diamond Skin will hugely improve your durability in close combat, giving you regular ‘breathers’ of no damage at all.  Slow Time provides you with not only reduced incoming damage thanks to its slowing effects on enemies and their projectiles, it also affords you time to reposition and with Time Warp active, improves your close-range damage even further.  Energy Armor is your obvious choice- in melee range, you take a lot of weapon attacks, so a 65% increase to Armor is really important.  Additionally, keying it up with Prismatic Armor further bolsters your likely-impressive Resistances, so that you’re not falling behind in your resistance to spell damage.  Arcane Orbit is a form of Arcane Orb that you don’t want to cast as often as possible- instead, you make sure you have four orbs when you begin a fight, and other than that don’t worry about it unless you’re sure you have the Arcane Power to spare.  The damage is nice, but the orbs never trigger faster than one per second, no matter how many enemies are in your face, and it’s more there for the added damage than to stop things from beating on you.

Blur is the obvious passive skill choice here, of course, with Evocation accelerating your use of Frost Nova, Diamond Skin, and Slow Time- improving both your resilience and damage output quite well.  Arcane Dynamo goes well with your attacking tendencies- you should easily be able to get in five Spectral Blade attacks between any two castings of Frozen Mist, and that’s going to kick its damage up that much farther.

This build has a couple of odd other requirements that you need to make use of- you need to have a certain amount of life drain, especially on your weapon, since Spectral Blade uses your weapon’s traits, unlike the other Wizard skills.  This will let you stave off more damage constantly, and heal up fairly nicely each time Diamond Skin gives you a damageless time.  You also want to have at least a good gem in your helmet to boost your Life total, if not a significant amount of Life bonus on your armor.  Generally speaking you can sacrifice 1% weapon damage increase (via Intelligence or attack speed) for every (level x10) Life (via straight Life, Life%, or Stamina) as a rough estimate for where you should balance out- so it’s okay to lose a little damage for Life, but not too much.