Diablo III- Skills Article CLIV: The Wizard, Passive Skills (2 of 6)

Power Hungry: You regain 30 Arcane Power whenever you are healed by a health globe.

While slightly more effective for the close-range Wizard, Power Hungry is still of notable use to the more mobile variable-range and long-range Wizard.  Although Wizards lack ways to generate extra health globes, which are far more common among Barbarians and Monks, the portion of Arcane Power regained from the effect of this skill is very large, so the Wizard shouldn’t need to search for ways to increase the drop rate.  It’s a bit erratic, though, so if you need Arcane Power badly, you should swap this out for one of the later skills that gets you more Arcane Power as soon as you can.  This skill gets much stronger in party play, when you can team up with a melee character who increases the health globe drop rate and will grab them for you in the midst of combat, rather than having the globe wait for you to close to a more dangerous proximity with whatever you’re fighting.

Evocation: Your cooldowns take 15% less time.

This skill is highly variable, and should really be chosen as a third Passive skill after you’ve determined exactly what Active skills you’re going to rely on.  While the Wizard has a number of cooldowns, not all of them really want reducing, and not all Wizards even care if those get reduced.  While it’s nice to have emergency abilities like Teleport(Fracture) or Wave of Force more often, if you really need the cooldowns reduced on your panic buttons that badly, then there’s something else you’re doing wrong- perhaps you’re trying to play a close- or variable- range Wizard when your gear, skills, or playstyle are more suited to a long-range Wizard.  Equally importantly, 15% isn’t much of the cooldown time for most of the Wizard cooldowns, which tend to be in the 10-25 second range.  Pay close attention to how you’re using your cooldown skills, and figure out if you’re doing it because you need them to make up for some other deficit, if you’re doing it because they’re more powerful for your activities than other options, or just because they’re fun.  If they’re on cooldown most of the time, and your reason is either the first one or the last one, make sure you examine your other Passive skill options closely and see if something else might do a better job of helping you stay competent.

Glass Cannon: You deal 15% more damage, but your Armor and Resistances are lowered by 10%.

This is pretty exclusively a skill for long-range Wizards, particularly those who tend to ‘alpha strike’ and unload their entire Arcane Pool at the start of a fight to obliterate as many enemies as possible.  Close-range Wizards can’t affort the extra incoming damage, and variable-range Wizards will find that while sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it will cause sudden critical existence failure.  If you’re a long-range Wizard and you’re considering this skill, you need to examine your defensive skill choices carefully.  Are your skill selections that aren’t damaging spells more oriented towards getting out of the way of enemy attacks, punishing enemies (and weakening them) for getting too close, or surviving attacks?  Do you even have defensive skill selections at all?  If you lack defensive skill selections, or your self-protection skills aren’t oriented towards avoiding coming under attack in the first place, then this skill is wrong for you, no matter how tasty the extra damage looks.  Added damage means precisely nothing if you aren’t around to deal it anymore, after all.  A properly evasive wizard, particularly one relying on things like Teleport and Slow Time, can get a lot of extra damage out of this skill with very little increased risk.