Diablo III- Skills Article CXXXVII: The Wizard, Conjuration Skills- Familiar

Familiar (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, and attacks nearby enemies at your attack rate for 20% weapon damage as Arcane damage.

Probably one of the least flashy and complex skills available to the Wizard, the Familiar is nonetheless a useful and reliable source of extra damage.  The fact that it is indestructible and untargetable makes it a perfect fire-and-forget spell, as long as you don’t forget to refresh it every five minutes.  The downside of this spell is that the familiar targets random nearby enemies, so it’s damage you don’t have any control over either.  A decent way to squeeze out some more damage for a short-range or variable-range Wizard, this skill usually gets overlooked in favor of one of the Armor spells.

Sparkflint (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, increases the damage of all your skills and attacks by 12%, and attacks nearby enemies at your attack rate for 20% weapon damage as Fire damage.

By trading off the good damage type of Arcane for the less-desirable Fire damage type, you turn your familiar into a buff- a buff more powerful than Magic Weapon- and it still attacks on its own as well.  Not a bad choice at all for close-range Wizards who don’t mind skipping both Ice Armor and Energy Armor.

Dartling (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, and attacks nearby enemies at your attack rate for 20% weapon damage as Lightning damage that has a 100% chance of piercing.

For situations with enemies behind other enemies, the Dartling is a nice alternate form for the Familiar.  While you still can’t control the thing’s targeting, the fact that the attacks will hit their target and everything behind it in a line makes it useful in heavily-crowded areas if you can stay in close range and not get killed.  A passably useful upgrade.

Ancient Guardian (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, and attacks nearby enemies at your attack rate for 20% weapon damage as Arcane damage.  While you are below 35% of your maximum Life, the Ancient Guardian will nullify all the damage from one attack against you once every 6 seconds.

This is a pretty clear attempt to put Familiar in a position to compete with the Armor skills as a defensive option.  The effect is very interesting and could be quite strong- if not for a few unfortunate facts.  First of all, you can usually expect to be taking six or more attacks per second if you’re in close range with enough enemies to be worried, forget one attack every six seconds.  Second of all, Wizards don’t have much durability.  With Intelligence as their main attribute, their best improvements to damage only increase their defenses against elemental damage, meaning that virtually all melee attacks and a hefty portion of ranged attacks are going to deal full damage, so unless there’s a huge investment in Vitality and Life, 35% of maximum Life is not a point that a Wizard can survive at.  This relegates the use of Ancient Guardian to a few particular boss fights where the damage per hit isn’t large enough to auto-kill a fragile Wizard, but the hits don’t come in fast enough to overload the Ancient Guardian’s defensive measure.  Offhand, only Belial comes to mind as fitting that requirement, and only if you’re good at dodging anyway.  If you need a defense out of your Conjuration skill, skip this and look to an Armor.  You’ll save yourself a lot of repair bills and time.

Arcanot (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, and attacks nearby enemies at your attack rate for 20% weapon damage as Arcane damage.  While the familiar is active, you regain an additional 2 Arcane Power per second.

Probably the best of the Familiar runes, Arcanot is useful to long-range Wizards- who are the ones that can afford to skip their Armor skills for a Familiar to begin with.  Adding this to your already not-negligible ability to recover Arcane Power on your own, the Arcanot will keep you up and running on your stronger spells for longer than you would otherwise.

Cannoneer (20 Arcane Power): A small glowing familiar hovers over your shoulder for the next 5 minutes.  This familiar is indestructible, and launches miniature Arcane Orbs at nearby enemies that explode for 20% weapon damage as Arcane damage with a 6-yard radius.

Probably the best form of Familiar for people who want to get damage out of it, the Cannoneer’s area-effect attacks take a lot of the weakness out of its range limitation and random targeting- if you’re close to the enemies and they’re all close to each other, most if not all of them will be getting hit regardless of who the Cannoneer shoots at.  Still, a close-range Wizard wants an Armor more than they want this.