Diablo III- Skills Article CXXVII: The Wizard, Overview

The Wizard is, perhaps surprisingly, the most mixed-range character class in Diablo III.  While the Barbarian and Monk are primarily close range combatants who have a few options for targets that are out of reach and several defensive skills to keep them alive, the Wizard has a number of skills that are geared towards protection and retribution in close combat, but doesn’t usually care if their enemy is within arm’s reach or not.  Where the Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor have a lot of long-range attacks and a batch of close-range abilities that either are geared towards getting them out of close range or towards using just before escaping close range, the Wizard has a fair number of attacks that reach across the screen, and their close-range skills are aimed at surviving close encounters and either entering or exiting close range based on what the player prefers.

Because of this mixture of abilities, and the lack of the 30% damage reduction that comes with being a melee class, the Wizard wants more than any other class to set up a suite of skills that gives them options for both close and long range, so they can steadily hand out damage no matter where they and their enemy are.  They have enough durability that all their time close to an enemy doesn’t need to be spent either frantically killing it now or escaping, but not so much that they can spend all their time in melee.  This gives the Wizard a form of flexibility that is unlike any of the other classes currently in the game.  It also means that the Wizard, more than the Witch Doctor and far more than the Demon Hunter, can actually take advantage of non-ranged weapons that deal high damage and have large Intelligence bonuses.  Some Wizards will also benefit majorly from investing their gear choices in trading out a certain amount of Intelligence and other offensive boosts for increased Life and similar defensive effects.

One of the important qualities of the Wizard as a class compared to the others is that while they don’t have any skills that restore their resource pool, like the Witch Doctor, it also is a very small pool- only larger than the Barbarian’s Fury pool and the Demon Hunter’s Focus pool at its default size.  Because of this, a high cost is such a limiting factor on a skill, that only three skills in their entire set have both an Arcane Power cost and a Cooldown, and only one of those cooldowns is more than 15 seconds.  This means that the Wizard can spend a lot less time focusing on when they use their skills to manage their resource, and more on when they use their skills to fit the situation.  This means that even two wizards with identical rune selection may be playing very differently.