[Boney Jack was my first character that I found interesting enough to play through to Baron status. I wanted to make a necromancer fitting the grim reaper, leader of the army of the dead, image, so Jack would aim to max out the skeleton skills for his army (including skeletal mages, but no other minions), and use a scythe to take down the act bosses. I also decided not to use Iron Maiden, since I didn't want Jack's army to be just reflected damage fodder.]
In normal difficulty, Jack's army was all-powerful. Early on in the game, he found Bloodrise (unique morning star) and would enter into melee combat alongside his skeletons. He gambled Soul Harvest (unique scythe) somewhere in act 2, and used that for all act bosses up to nightmare Andariel. [I forget what he used for Andariel in normal.]
Jack found his first exceptional scythe and imbued it in time for his
confrontation with Duriel in nightmare difficulty. He was quite pleased with the
result, and used this same weapon against both nightmare Mephisto and nightmare
Diablo. For normal melee, he still used Bloodrise, the 50% attack rating
bonus it gave being more useful than increased damage from an alternative
weapon.
Through nightmare difficulty, Jack's skeletal army became increasingly fragile when faced with boss monsters having any enchantments causing AoE damage (lightning-enchanted and holy shock being the worst examples). The normal routine was for Jack to spend a while in melee combat, slowly building up his army. With his army established, he would storm through an area or two, until he encountered a boss with one of the difficult enchantments that would wipe out his army, leaving him to kill the boss on his own, and rebuild his army from scratch.
Late in nightmare, and even more so in hell difficulty, it was the first
part of this routine that gave Jack the most problems. With just one or
two skeletons raised they would be quickly killed by the next pack of
monsters he encountered, but if he left bodies, hoping to come back to
them later, the game would have cleared away all the older corpses
before he had killed enough monsters to make a useful-sized army
(frequently, corpses would disappear with just one trip back to town
for healing and restocking).
Into hell difficulty, Jack found his survival rate for melee combat
dropping alarmingly. He went shopping and bought himself a wand which
gave him the Bone Spear and Attract skills, and started using Bone Spear
to assist his army in dispatching the more troublesome boss monsters.
He also found and imbued his first grim scythe, and would use this
weapon against all the remaining act bosses (his third imbue was junk,
and sold immediately).
From act 3 in hell difficulty, Jack's strategy changed. As actually killing the monsters became increasingly difficult (and dangerous), he became more concerned with getting around them to continue the game. He started using Attract more and more to distract groups of monsters while he sneaked past (this was the only way he managed to get a foothold in some underground areas where the entry was swarmed by mobs of monsters that he had no hope of surviving against, notably the Spider Cavern and Ruined Temple).
However, Jack did complete all of the game quests, except for killing the high council in hell difficulty. He had the three council members parked one on each of the waypoint platforms in Kurast, and killed Toorc Icefist easily enough, but the other two both had the 'extra fast' enchantment, and would just heal themselves faster than Jack could damage them (even with an army of 20+ skeletal mages and a cold mage hireling to assist).
After struggling so much through the last two acts, Jack's army proved surprisingly effective when he finally reached the River of Flame. This was partly a matter of geography (the river funneling monsters in towards his army so they could only attack in limited numbers, instead of charging in from all sides), but also because of the blood maggots. Jack loved blood maggots. His main problem in the latter parts of the game had been getting enough corpses together to create a decent-sized army, but with the blood maggots he could lure a whole fleet of young away from their mothers, dance around them using Bone Spear and Attract, killing them off one be one until he had a whole pile of corpses from which to create his army.
In one final 12-hour game session, Jack did the hellforge quest, cleared out the River of Flame and Chaos Sanctuary, and hacked Diablo into itty-bitty pieces with Hailstone Skewer, his trusty grim scythe. Hephasto was lightning-enchanted and stone skin, and was taken down very very slowly from across a convenient piece of river with level 3 Bone Spear. Of the three seal bosses, only the Grand Vizier (extra fast and multishot) proved troublesome, mostly because of his ability to fly (and so he couldn't be parked and shot at across the river). De Seis, once separated from his minions, went down to a couple of strokes from Jack's scythe.
Boney Jack made Baron at level 52 with the stats shown. Skills
at this point (with +5 bonus from normal equipment) :
Normal equipment setup:
Equipment used when fighting Diablo in hell difficulty:
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