Diablo II: Matriarch Jaheira

Jaheira is an Assassin who specializes in the use of traps to deal with her enemies. She's considered a spellcaster and not designed for melee or close combat in any sense of the concept. As such she's quite content to stay behind her desert warrior mercenary and lay traps while he pokes monsters to death.

Jaheira's journey starts off quite slow, as she's forced to engage in melee combat with all of the monsters encountered due to traps at a low level costing too much mana to use consistantly. Still, she doesn't encounter any real danger from the monster encountered, and once she picks up a Rogue mercenary as backup things start to pick up. Jaheira does have access to Shock Web rather quickly and uses it against dangerous monsters, such as uniques, to speed up the process. Other than that all of Act I is done in melee range of monsters. It isn't until Act II that Jaheira obtains access to the more potent traps and has access to a long supply of mana potions to be able to use traps on a normal basis. Even then she finds that half her inventory is full of mana potions and trips back to town to restock are rather frequent.

Most of Normal, once traps such as Lightning Sentry, are available is fairly simple. Cloak of Shadows is used liberally to freeze monsters in place, then traps are spread around to help the mercenary wipe them out. Jaheira finds that she isn't in too much danger personally due to this tactic, however that does change a bit in Act IV and V. Since there are a fair amount of stationary, but destroyable, objects Jaheira can't use CoS without fear of crashing the game. So the mercenary gets a bit hammered in these areas and a constant supply of health potions is required to keep him viable.

Still these areas aren't too difficult and it ends up being the act bosses that are the most difficult to handle. Jaheira ended up allowing the mercenary to be knocked off early and didn't bother resurrecting him. Her tactic to deal with the bosses was to lay traps in the general area and just try to run around in a random pattern to keep the boss from hitting her but also to keep the boss within range of her traps. Then the traps are recast when they expire. CoS is not used in these instances as it truly doesn't give any sort of advantage for the traps.

To be honest Nightmare and Hell difficulties went in about the same manner, with the same tactics used with basically the same results. Cos, BoS and the lightning traps were used liberally throughout and no monster packs or uniques posed much of a problem to Jaheira. She even ran Hell at level 3 difficulty and could probably have gotten it up as far as 5 or 6 without putting her in danger, but as there wasn't much challenge in it I just wanted to finish the character up.

Stats:
Level 83
Strength - 79(122)
Dexterity - 79(121)
Vitality - 227(227)
Energy - 125(125)

Life - 895(938)
Mana - 323(339)

Lightning Resistance - 74
Fire Resistance - 74
Cold Resistance - 34
Poison Resistance - 63

Skills:
Fire Blast - 20(34)
Charged Bolt Sentry - 20(34)
Lightning Sentry - 20(34)
Death Sentry - 20(34)
Shock Web - 8(22)
Burst of Speed - 1(9)
Weapon Block - 1(9)
Cloak of Shadows - 1(9)

Equipment:
Weapon: Bartuc's Cut-Throat
Weapon: Bartuc's Cut-Throat
Armor: Skin of the Vipermagi (Ral)
Belt: Arachnid Mesh
Helm: Coronet - FR 18%, LR 47%, CR 18%, PR 18%, 8% LL, +2 Assassin skills
Boots: Heavy Boots - LR 22%, CR 40%, PR 33%, +2 Dex, 14% MF
Gloves: Laying of Hands
Amulet: 9 life, +3 Traps
Ring 1: All resist 15%
Ring 2: 99 AR, LR 29%, PR 30%, PLR 25%

Mercenary (Holy Freeze Desert Mercenary)
Helm: Tal Rasha's Horadric Crest
Armor: Shaftstop
Weapon: Hone Sundan (AmnShaelShael)

Hellforge:
NM: Pul
Hell: Hel