Destroyer TrapperJoan entered the NM Rogue Camp at 36 with a few
pretty nice items:

Mahim-Oak Curio
personalized (;^) and pdiamonded Bverritt Keep
Rockfleece
a nice rare blade talon from Baal with 100% monster flee

But also some not-so-nice items:

a so-so self-repairing rare bone helm
one ring from Ormus -- and the other was even worse
junky gloves, belt and boots, except for a pair of low-dur Cleglaw's
gloves saved for special occasions.

And a very full inventory and stash:

full complement of gems
runes including what Qualkhek gave her, plus a Sol from the Forge and
an assortment of lower ones for crafting
about a dozen full rejuvs
a dozen hp and resistance charms
one TP tome and two ID tomes

Her primary attacks were LS and Venomed BF to make corpses, followed
by DS.  The SW was a very capable tank in almost all situations, even
though still a pre-teen.  Usually she was set to lay either LSes or
DSes.

Act 1 went easily, as the 100% MF blade talon kept almost everything
at a safe distance.  The long haul from Cold Plains to Outer Cloister
took four hours, the rest was done in shorter sessions.  Andy was a
bit rambunctious, but no real problem at clvl 42.  Drops were junk,
but by far the worst part was lack of inventory and stash space:
constantly having to unpack and repack the cube when working up gems,
runes, and rejuvs was incredibly annoying.  Tried a bit of crafting,
and ended up using crafted belt and gloves.  Keeping charms from
overwhelming my inventory space was a minor issue.  Somewhat
surprisingly, ID was never an issue at all, and I didn't even bother
saving up items for the free Cain ID at the end of Act 1.  Found a
third ID tome in the Barracks, but decided I didn't need and didn't
even have room for it.

Act 2 was also uneventful, but the drops improved: A two-hole circlet
dropped almost as soon as I walked out into the desert, so I made Lore
to replace the self-repairing bone helm (which had little else to
recommend it).  Not sure if that was such a great idea, but the 30 LR,
7 damage reduced and +1 all skills seemed worth the Sol.  Around the
same time, I completed my collection of 20+ resistance jewels covering
all three elements, so I was on the lookout for a three-hole hat to
replace the circlet when it wore out or I got to Hell, whichever came
first (never did find a three-hole hat, so those three jewels just
occupied three inventory spaces for nothing).  The desert areas were a
long haul too, taking five hours to complete.  Creeping Feature
dropped a Sureshrill Frost, which replaced the blade talon (big cold
damage and CBF being IMO better than 100% MF), and a few minutes
later, a Bonesnap popped out of a chest.  Woot!  40% CB would make
short work of high-hp bosses, even though I'd have no shield when
BFing them.  This was confirmed when Duriel went down to a
Bonesnapping BF in under a minute, with no trips to town needed.
Victorious at around clvl 50, TrapperJoan burned a Ral to repair her
Rockfleece, and boarded Meshif's tub for Kurast.

The jungles began to be slightly more difficult going for TrapperJoan,
especially poison attacks by spider bosses.  She didn't have the space
to stock up antidote potions, and in many cases the poison lasted
several minutes.  This is a design error in the game: such long poison
duration has no effect on anyone but ironmen, and for us it is nothing
but a royal PITA.  I couldn't chug reds, so if there was no well in
the area or I had already used the well, I had little choice but to go
and hang around the Kurast Docks, hitting on the sarong-clad cuties
(who not surprisingly were rather put off by my bright green
complexion) and discussing obscure trap techniques with Natalya (Ormus
means well, but let's face it: he's a sententious old bore) until the
poison wore off and the regen belt had time to refill the red ball.

Ran into a nasty XF spider boss in one of the abandoned temples in
Upper Kurast.  He seemed to be able to despatch my level 12 SW almost
instantly, and I never was able to read all his mods.  Had to do him
with LS alone.  He dropped me another Rockfleece, but with less dur
than the one I had just repaired, so I left it on the floor.  I was
finding a tremendous number of ID scrolls in the Kurast areas, and my
inventory of them peaked at 46!  Heck with it.  I wasn't IDing that
much stuff any more, mostly jewelry and charms, so I just tossed all
the ID that didn't fit in my two tomes.  Which felt rather weird, but
what could I do?  Toss full purples?

The rest of Act 3 was uneventful.  The Council was not too difficult,
though there were a few nasty moments when combined attacks had me
down to about 1/10 max hp.  The CBF on the Sureshrill helped
tremendously in dealing with cantor blizzards.  The Durance was huge,
of course, and wouldn't you know, the stairs down were just a few
steps from the stairs up, but I cleared the whole level before finding
them.  No matter: I had to clear it all anyway.  It was just annoying.
Woke Meph and then retreated to BF him from across the moat, taking
him down quickly with the Bonesnap's 40% CB.  No sweat, and only had
to recast the SW about a dozen times to keep him occupied.  His drops
all sucked, but I knew I'd already had my share of good ones.  On to
the Pandy Fort at clvl 54.

Act 4 was also no problem.  The Bonesnap took down Izzy, and the
Sureshrill Frost easily took down everything else up to the RoF.
Tearhaunch boots dropped from a balrog boss, which solved my footwear
problem for a while.  Heyphatso talked a good fight, as usual, but
when I TP trapped him in one of those little rectangular flagstoned
areas and BFed him with the Bonesnap from across the ditch, he soon
howled and coughed up the hammer.  The Forge was bery, bery good to
me, and yielded an Io!  Woot!  That would let me make Black as soon as
I found a decent three-hole, one-handed mace: 40% CB, cold damage and
knockback on a one-hander!  IMO Black is one of the most under-rated
rune words in the game, considering how easy it is to make, and how
powerful it is against high-hp bosses.

I'd been crafting belts and gloves with just about every junk jewel I
found, but never got anything with good resistances.  The pdiamonded
Bverritt Keep was not going to be giving me the level of res I was
going to need in Hell, so about this time I started looking for a good
three-hole shield with high blocking to receive my by-now-excessive
inventory of pdiamonds.  That made three three-hole items on my
have-to-have list: a hat for the three nice res jewels, a one-handed
mace to Blacken, and a shield for pdiamonds.

Clearing the Chaos Sanc was fairly trivial with DS.  However, the
Infector had put a scare into me in Normal, so I took the precaution
of carefully paving his spawn area with corpses, and not blowing any
of them up.  Then when all was in readiness, I popped five DSes on the
mess and called down the thunder.  Five seconds later I peeped around
the corner, and no more Infector's gang.  He was still there, with
about 1/10 of his hp left, but my SW tanked him and he went down to
the mighty Bonesnap BF.  Earthquake time again, so I slipped on the
Cleglaw gloves and went to face Mr. D.  The SW tanked him like a
champ, with recasts needed only about every five seconds, and the
amazing Bonesnap BF took him down in about a minute.  Got stuck in his
bone cage once, but the Bonesnap made short work of that, too (like,
duh!).  No sweat at clvl 57.

NM Diablo had been so easy to kill, I was now starting to think in
terms of ironman guardians.  Act 5 did not seem like much of a
challenge, either, as I was still leveling well and the drops kept
coming.  Dac Farren gave me a pair of Frosties that made mana pretty
much a non-issue, and some fat guy with a whip in the Arreat Plateau
dropped a perfect +30 res all ammy to replace my Mahim-Oak Curio when
it was time to go to Hell.  Shenk bowed to DS in a few seconds and
dropped his usual junk, but I found a three-hole superior tower shield
near him, and while it didn't give a lot of defense, it did give 49%
blocking.  So to free up some space and resistance room, I ditched the
Bverritt Keep and stuck 3 pdiamonds in the tower shield.  With that
on, all her elemental resistances were at 75, even without Fade.

Anya's rescue went off without a hitch, despite the presence of gloams
in the FR: with carefully planned deployment, LS followed by DS is
very powerful anywhere non-LI monsters are plentiful.  I picked up an
ethereal 3-hole jagged star in the CP, so I was ready to make my Black
mace, even though I kept it in reserve almost until I reached the
summit, just in case something better dropped (of course, a 3-hole
tyrant club dropped about a minute after I Blackened the jstar, but it
wasn't much better because the jstar was eth).

The Halls of Anguish and Pain were no problem, but I was feeling
nervous as I stepped down the stairs into the Halls of Vaught to beard
Nihlathak in his den.  Needn't have worried: kept popping DSes as I
slowly cleared his little bachelor suite, and suddenly it was music
time.  Never even got a chance to sneer contemptuously at his "we bad"
spiel.

Back into the ice caves, heading for the summit.  Ran into a double
boss pack of XF lightning-immune cursed and convicted tainteds in the
Icy Cellar that took about 10 minutes to defeat, but TrapperJoan was
never in real danger.  Not sure it would have been possible to beat
them if they'd been near the entrance, though, instead of trapped on
the other side of some ice.

Then it was out onto the summit, wishing I could just, you know, enjoy
the view for a while.  The Ancients are usually by far the hardest
barrier for ironmen to deal with, as they must normally be dispatched
on the first try: even if you respawn them by TPing to town, you have
no way to replace any pots you use before leaving.  I had 28 full
purples saved up for the occasion, and dropped 12 on the ground, with
the rest in my belt.  Checked clvl (63), equipped the tower shield and
Black jagged star, and activated the altar.

The mods did not look too bad, and I immediately went after Korlic,
who is generally the most dangerous of the three.  He had only one
mod, Holy Freeze.  If I was to have any chance against the others, I
knew I had to take him out first, and fast.  Unfortunately, the damned
HF meant it was almost impossible to get away from him or avoid any of
their attacks, and the other two were definitely on my case.  The SW
was tanking well, so I let Korlic have it with BF and started quaffing
purples as needed.  But something was wrong, because Korlic's hp bar
was barely budging.  After about a minute of solid attacks with a
supposed 40% CB, his hp bar was still not even halfway down, and my
belt full of purples was almost gone.  I broke off the attack, plodded
with agonizing slowness through syrup back toward the summit entrance
and picked up my dropped purples, recast the SW and went back into the
fight.  But it was no use.  The CB BF that had toasted Diablo so
easily was simply not hurting Korlic, and his Holy Freeze meant there
was no way to run or fight it out tactically.  Purples gone; deeds.
TrapperJoan was just not worthy of Mount Arreat's secrets.

Holy Freeze was certainly a nasty aura for Korlic to spawn with, so
maybe I should have reset the old guys instead of trying to fight it
out.  In the confined space of the summit, with no way to get away
from the aura long enough to BF effectively, it was definitely going
to be a tough fight.  But I believe if the CB had worked I could have
done it, and I can't figure out why Korlic was apparently immune to
it.  Anyone have any ideas on that?

Looking back on this project, there were a few things I could have
done better: I wasted some skill points in Fade, which I never really
had to use, and might not even have needed at more than level 1 in
Hell, because my resistance items were so good by late NM.  I also put
one extra point in BoS and one in TS (brain spike, what can I say?).
All those could have gone into LS/DS.  Maybe it would have been better
to leave Venom alone and put more ponts into the traps?  But then
lightning immunes in Hell would be a bigger problem, and
physical/lightning immunes an even bigger problem.

Tactically, maybe I'd have done better on the summit just piling on
the LSes and forgetting BF once it became clear Korlic was CB immune.
I'm quite sure that if I'd got past the Ancients, I would not have had
much trouble finishing NM and most of Hell.  I was able to do
significant amounts of lightning, physical, poison and fire damage
(CE), and even some cold damage to slow the monsters down.  Barring a
stair trap or something of the kind, only Duriel, Nilly and the
Ancients seemed to promise TrapperJoan really daunting challenges in
Hell, and maybe not even Nilly.

As for the ironman experience in general, the high level of difficulty
was mostly a lot of fun except for the storage space problem, which
was just intensely annoying.  Given Blizzard's idiocy in not making
the stash 10x10, SP ironmen really need to be able to mule.  MP
ironman teams should probably also be allowed to take along a mule;
otherwise crucial gems, runes, craftables, etc. could be lost if the
char holding them dies.

IMO some provision should be made in the ironman rules to allow use of
mercs after the first one dies (maybe just allowing one hire after
doing the merc quests in Acts 1, 3 and 5, and no resurrections?), and
to handle re-entry of areas in realm games that blow away, without
allowing indefinite re-clears for xp and pots (maybe a max clvl limit
for each act?).  I had been concerned at the beginning that my
progress through the difficulties would be too fast, and I'd get
beyond the optimum xp area and start falling behind in clvl in a
vicious circle.  That did not happen.  Indeed, by clearing every area
of every monster, I was almost always one act behind the optimum xp
area for my clvl, and was on track to finish NM at around 66, which is
certainly a little old even for SP.

Next?  I would definitely be up for an ironman team project on the
realms.  Failing that, I might try another ironman build in SP.  I've
tried summoner and trapper in 1.10, maybe it's time to try something
else: hammerdins are strong now, but without a party or minions, their
auras are half wasted; meteorb sorcs can kill easily, but also die
easily.  Throwers are out, as there is no way to replenish their
weapons.  Bowazons are weak against act bosses without top gear, while
shapeshifters, concentrate/berserk barbs and other meleers need weapon
repairs too often.

It's not easy to plan a viable ironman build.  Ironmen need to start
out with strategies in place to kill all monsters and complete all
quests, especially the Ancients because ironmen can't just go out and
earn more rejuvs.  Any build suggestions?

-- Roy L