Basic Math - The Failure of Diablo Melee

[MongoJerry]

Yeah, in playing around with the character builder on the D3 site, Galv Ward, Illusionist, and Temporal Flux struck me as the "duh" choices for passives. They look the best on paper, anyhow. Evocation is the only other one that looked appealing to me at all. Maybe something like http://tinyurl.com/87lsplw where there's three sources of Arcane damage to work with Flux, nothing costs over 20 AP, and your signature spell generates 4 AP (I don't know numerically exactly how many max AP L60 Wizards have, but I know the armour I picked lowers it by 20 and I see skills that cost 60) so it seemed in theory that you'd be more likely to run into issues with cooldowns than running out of AP with any major frequency.

Passives I have found useful at different times during my Wizard's career:

Blur
Power Hungry (Don't knock it -- it keeps your AP ball full in long fights)
Evocation
Glass Cannon
Prodigy
Astral Presence
Temporal Flux

I expect that when I get into Inferno, Illusionist and/or Critical Mass (when I have about 20% critical hit chance) will probably be useful, too. Other Wizards love Galvanizing Ward more than I (and I can't say they're wrong), and of course the magic school specific passives are useful if you're that kind of Wizard. So, the Wizard definitely has some very useful passives that one has to make hard decisions about.