Passive skills are skills that add bonuses all the time, once points are placed into them. Passive skills are the opposite of active skills.
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Description
Passive skills are not used directly for attacks, and tend to provide bonuses to numerous other skills, or add percentages to damage, to hit, defense, resistances, and other useful stats. Some effects also comes from passive skills, such as activating a bonus under special circumstances, such as a critical hit, or being hit.
Passive skills are often as or more important than some active skills, but usually receive less attention since they are not flashy or obvious in their effects. An example is making the possibility
Passive skills seldom possess synergistic properties. Passive skills are not signature skills.
Development
At BlizzCon 2008, there were far more passive than active skills in the three character trees, bit it changed in May 2009 and was shown with more detail at BlizzCon 2009.