Diablo III- Skills Article CLXXXXVI: Wizard Elective Mode Build Three- Stand Back

Mouse Skills:
Spectral Blade (Impactful Blades or Thrown Blade)
Explosive Blast (Short Fuse)
Hotbar Skills:
Mirror Image (Duplicates)
Teleport (Fracture)
Wave of Force (Impactful Wave)
Slow Time (Perpetuity)
Passive Skills:
Evocation
Illusionist
Unstable Anomaly

Impactful Blades is the obvious choice here, being the only Primary skill option that will actually keep enemies off of you.  If you find you need reach rather than the ability to keep things from ever getting to you, Thrown Blade can prove very useful also.  Whichever of these skills you choose, you should find yourself using it frequently, but you probably won’t be holding still and swinging it multiple times.  As your lowest-length cooldown, Explosive Blast is your other mouse skill, and it’s set to Short Fuse so that you don’t have to predict things getting near you- instead, you can just react.

On your action bar are four cooldown skills, each of which overlaps another to some degree.  Duplicates provides you with lots of copies to fake out enemies and keep them from attacking you, particularly when those copies use your knockback and slow skills to further disorient foes.  Fracture provides you with another set of decoys tacked onto your movement power, but be aware- the two sets of decoys are exclusive.  You don’t want to try using these skills one after the other or you’ll be destroying your own images when you form a new set.  Generally, you’re going to want to keep both fingers ready so that you can use whichever of the two skills is more appropriate tactically.

Wave of Force and Slow Time overlap in the opposite direction- rather than serving a similar purpose and filling similar tactical holes, the two combine especially well, Slow Time catching projectiles you can then throw back with Wave of Force.  Impactful Wave sends things flying extra far, though if you don’t mind the randomness, you can instead apply Teleporting Wave or Exploding Wave.  Impactful Wave provides the most distance (and thus the most protection), though.  Slow Time is in Perpetuity mode so that it cools down almost as quickly as Wave of Force, giving you a big set of four defensive hotbar skills that all have roughly the same recharge time- so you can cycle through them and pretty much always have something ready.

Illusionist and Evocation both improve on this even further- Illusionist gives you back Mirror Image -and- Teleport if you get hit hard enough, with no limit to how frequently it fires.  Evocation flat-out cuts down all your recharge times, which is especially nice with Explosive Blast.  For the third Passive Skill, there’s really no call for any Arcane Power improvement- the skills you’re going to use are all low-cost cooldown skills anyways.  Instead, Unstable Anomaly is in, just in case you can’t Wave of Force/Explosive Blast often enough to keep things either off you or dead.

This build is a touch quirky, since it prefers close range attacks despite being set up to stay out of reach.  If Impactful Blades’ slowing effect turns out to be unnecessary, you can alleviate this by putting Electrocute (Chain Lightning) or Electrocute (Forked Lightning), depending on which you find more useful.