Diablo III- Skills Article CLVI: The Wizard, Passive Skills (4 of 6)

Cold Blooded: You deal 20% extra damage to enemies who are chilled or Frozen.

Cold Blooded is an elemental-theme Passive skill.  Keep in mind when considering it that Cold damage, by default, causes chilling and occasional Frozen- no matter what the source is and no matter whether or not the effect is specifically mentioned.  Not only is this glorious for boss battles where you pack Ray of Frost, but it also strongly suits those close-range Wizards who use Ice Armor for protection.  Since Chilling Aura causes you to generate a large area in which enemies are chilled, and that area is almost exactly the range you want enemies to be in so you can nail them with your best close-range spells, Cold Blooded will always benefit you if you’re willing to keep Ice Armor.  This is not nearly as useful otherwise, and if you not only don’t have Chilling Aura but also havent’ got both Blizzard and Ray of Frost, you probably shouldn’t bother with this skill.  You also probably shouldn’t alter your skill selection just to allow you to use this skill- 20% extra damage is a fairly hefty boost, but if your tactics aren’t suited to the skills that cause chill and Frozen, then you’re going to lose more in inefficiency than you’ll gain in raw damage numbers.

Conflagration: When you deal Fire damage to a target, they take 10% extra damage from all sources for the next 3 seconds.  This effect does not stack with itself.

The Wizard has powerful Fire attacks, and so Conflagration is just as well-suited an elemental theme as Cold Blooded.  The part that makes Conflagration different is that where Cold Blooded is focused on the Wizard (dealing more damage to chilled enemies no matter what chilled them), Conflagration is more outward-focused and a good option for a fiery Wizard who operates in a party.  The 10% damage applies to your allies’ attacks and environmental damage as well, after all.  The real difficulty here is -keeping- things under the effect of the debuff.  The only spells that are available to Wizards that -default- to Fire damage are Hydra and Comet.  A bit of runework can fix that- the Fire-damage Familiar and the Fire rune for Shock Pulse- but as a whole the Fire skills that are available to the Wizard are slightly unreliable in their targetting.  If you manage to make those skills work without Conflagration, though, you should make sure this becomes your third Passive skill when you’re in a party.

Paralysis: When you deal Lightning damage to an enemy, that enemy has an 8% chance of being Stunned for 1.5 seconds.

As with Cold Blooded, the Wizard has a lot of options that deal Lightning damage, and this makes Paralysis immensely useful.  The tricky part here is that Lightning damage spells are in a varied set of ranges, particularly the most noteworthy Shock Pulse, Storm Armor, and Electrocute.  This makes the skill far easier to use for a variable-range Wizard.  Curiously, this is one of the better ways to get an actual defense out of Storm Armor, since it increases the frequency and value of stunning from the electrical retribution that said armor lets off.  Be aware that trying to lean too heavily on Paralysis will not only get you inconsistent results, but also do some very odd things to your skill selection.  Try to avoid working too hard to suit your Active skills to this Passive skill, and don’t rely on the Stun effect to be sustainable.  This is best used on large groups of enemies with area attacks, such as at short range with the explosive form of Shock Pulse, or with the five-target variant of Electrocute.  All the better if you can improve your attack/cast speed.