Diablo III- Skills Article CLXXXXIII: Elective Mode and the Wizard

The Wizard is only slightly beat out by the Witch Doctor for interesting interactions with Elective Mode.  With very little in the way of requirable skills, no default way of generating its resource, and two extremely broad skill groups, the sheer number of additional options afforded the Wizard by the existence of Elective Mode is rather staggering.  You are going to need to keep a careful eye on your Arcane Power costs, though- it’s very easy to pick a set of skills all of which cost huge chunks of your resource pool, and that’s a recipe for a failed Wizard (unless you planned to rely on a Primary skill above all else- and even that gets iffy).

In terms of mouse skills, the Wizard wants to make sure they have a Primary skill on tap.  Since Wizard Primary Skills all cost nothing at all, this will probably be your mainstay offense unless you’re really choosy with your other skills.  The other skill you put on your mouse should either be a low-cost frequent-use skill, or something that you plan to dump all of your Arcane Power into at once for a big chunk of damage (especially if it’s a channeled skill).

On the Wizard’s action bar, there should always be one of the Armor skills.  A Wizard without an Armor is possible, but they provide such a useful and strong array of support effects and protections that they’re kind of an obvious pick to have in place.  Aside from that, your hotbar should have at least one utility- if you’re focused on single-target damage, an area effect skill and if you’re focused on area damage, a single-target skill.  If you’ve got a roughly even mix already, then put something to slow things or accelerate yourself for escapes, or alternately something that’ll patch you up if you get a little bruised.  Which of those two choices you make depends on which type of Armor you have- if you’ve got a defensive enhancement, then you want the latter, but long-ranged Wizards will prefer the former.

As far as Passive skills are concerned, a huge portion of Wizards will want to pick one of the damage type based skills.  An even larger fraction of players will want Galvanic Ward, since its healing benefit is just flat out strong.  After that, you really want to focus on balancing between choosing Passives to support your Active skills and choosing your Active skills to benefit from your Passives.  This isn’t something you can do one side of the equation at a time- you need at least passing familiarity with all your skills in either selection, so you can figure out what you’re picking on one side and use that to help with your choices on the other.