Galvanizing Ward: Your Armor spells last 120 seconds longer. As long as you have an Armor spell active, you regain Life every second based on your level (maximum at level 60 is 310).
This skill is huge for close-range Wizards, who need all the damage mitigation they can get, and will adore not having to keep as close of an eye on their Armor spell. If you are trying to abuse Spectral Blades or otherwise destroy things when they’re near you, you want this skill for your first or second Passive slot. The regeneration isn’t going to save you from death mid-melee, nor will it make a huge difference in your life expectancy if you get pinned in place, but being able to recover quickly after brief or small melees can mean a lot- and can help you keep from getting into larger ones in the first place. The less you have to stop and recover, after all, the more you can do to kill things as they approach you, rather than having to evade for as long as you can. Stack this with other Life-regaining effects for the best value out of it, but don’t drop your Life total in order to get better percentage- that’s suicide right there.
Temporal Flux: Whenever you deal Arcane damage to an enemy, that enemy is Slowed by 30% for the next 2 seconds.
Arcane damage, particularly to areas or groups, is more common in the Wizard than the other damage types. This makes Temporal Flux very strong- particularly for variable-range and long-range Wizards, who want to have better control of where they are in relation to their enemies so that they have to worry and reposition less often. The Slow is also comparable to the lower-end Slow effects available from Frost skills, so in some senses this can be used with Disintegrate to make it act almost exactly like Ray of Frost- which can be a very desirable effect, particularly with the penetration ability that Disintegrate has. This skill can also be very defensively strong when combined with the self-centered explosions available to an Arcane-focused Wizard. There’s the added point that since this doesn’t directly impact your damage, it’s easier to not fill your entire Active skill set with Arcane damage and still take advantage of the skill without losing out on something. Also, like Conflagration, this works most effectively in a party, since you’re making your targets easier fodder for your melee allies.
Critical Mass: When you score a critical hit, you may reduce the cooldowns of all your skills currently on cooldown by 1 second.
This is the only passive skill that a Wizard has to support a focus on critical hits, and it’s actually very strong to a cooldown-heavy Wizard. Unfortunately, this is the only passive skill that a Wizard has to support a focus on critical hits, so it’s unlikely to take effect all that often. Evocation is simply flat-out more reliable than Critical Mass, and since most of the cooldown skills a Wizard has possess relatively short cooldown periods anyways, there’s not much call to improve on things. This is a third-slot Passive skill really, for use in case you have Evocation and would like to sometimes have your cooldowns end just a touch early.
