Playing as a wizard, should I worry about the type of weapon that I am using? (E.g., 1-handed vs 2-handed, wand vs dagger/axe)
What item attributes (on armor, jewelry, and weapons) would benefit Wizards the most? (E.g., Intellect, vitality, life-leech, reduced ranged damage, life per hit, chance on hit: [effect], health regen)
Always check out armor to see if it's better than the armor you currently have. Look for items that increase your stats, especially intelligence (Wizard's primary attribute.) Also, Wizards can use wands and staffs and various other weapons, so look for those as well.
Eventually you will probably want to start picking up only magic (blue) and rare (yellow) items as these sell for much more gold (tens or hundreds instead of 2 or 3) than regular weapons. Also, these can be salvaged by the blacksmith to get crafting supplies which can be used to craft better weapons in time.
Not really sure what you mean, but wizards can equip any type of weapon and will benefit both from weapon damage and intelligence (when it comes to damage).
As for other drops, guess im not really sure what you mean. Could you elaborate more?
Some of the people here stated that it's the weapon dps that determines your spell damage. That is incorrect. It's the weapons damage that determines your spell damage. Case in point, I found a 2 hander that had 100 less dps than my previous two hander, but the difference in damage was exponential. My previous weapon had 900-1300 damage, the new weapon was 1200-1600 damage. The higher the base damage on your weapon, the harder your spells will hit. Also to note, as you level up and your weapon damage increases, finding items with +damage will not have the same effect as +int, as intellect scales better with higher weapon damage. Consider swapping out your red gems in your weapons for +crit damage gems instead. These scale exponentially better as you level as well.
If you use a 2-HD mace, it only has .90 attack speed though it can hit hard if you get a nice Damage and Int count. If you use a few skills that regen mana, you can literally spam secondary attacks without running out of arcane power.
I use Ray of Frost with Snow Blast and Disinegrate w/ Entropy (my close range). never run out of arcane power. Something like this! http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ZiXRjS!XbW!ZYY.YZ
Pick up anything with a high dps. No matter if it's a wand or a one handed sword, higher dps means more damage and faster attack speed means more damage, and more damage usually is more desirable than +5 gold pickup range...
In 'normal' you won't really have to worry about vitality so you can just choose items which will give you the highest intelligence, damage or arcane power bonus.
Some of the wizard specific items like magic sources can be very nice because they usually have nice power regeneration rate bonus, but if you feel like you're too vulnerable you could use a shield.
It's really just a tradeoff, and I suggest you go for: "DPS - Damage - Intelligence - Arcane Power Stuff - Vitalaty - Everything else" but really, anything else could work just as well...
I have found the "best" weapons so far to be 2H maces/axes. Even at level 25 I was finding them on the auction house for 1200g for a +105 intelligence, 44.6 DPS, and a socket - along with 1.60% health leech and 3 health per hit regen. From about level 10 onwards I found it best to switch weapons every 5 levels or so - you easily make enough on your travels to still make a good profit.
