There is a nightmare difficulty, which is harder than 'hard' (actually, changes made in DKS to enchantments and combat made the game easier compared to the original D2:ED release, so a harder difficulty level was added).
You can easily make an effective intelligence based warrior using balanced or magic weapons. Unarmed damage is strength based, though, so you might have trouble getting your base damage up (keep an eye out for melee damage charms);
Monk/Ninja Build.
In the original release of D2:ED I played a strength based warrior, and recall hammers do tend to have more consistent damage than axes or one handed swords. The base damage range doesn't really have a huge impact on combat, though, especially once you add in stat and enchantment damage bonuses, etc. Maybe it would be noticeable with a two handed sword (which have a larger damage range), but at least when duel wielding I didn't notice a lot of variation in the number of attacks required to kill an opponent. For example, if an opponent type took an average of 3 or 4 hits to defeat, then that is what you would need most of the time; the odd fight you might get higher damage, or a critical hit, and kill it in 1 or (more likely) 2 hits, and sometimes you can miss or do lower damage and need 5 or 6 attacks, but you wouldn't be all over the place taking 1 to 6 hits going through a group of those opponents.
I wasn't overly concerned with magic damage, but going for the best conventional damage I could, I started off with swords, then switched to axes, mid to late game used mostly hammers, and ended up with a sword / axe combo.
You get lots of skill points in FoV, so even if a new level 35 character doesn't give you as many skill points as you could get with a D2:ED character, you still shouldn't have any problems.
You start with gold you can use to buy some equipment.
You can unlearn your skills at a trainer, but there is no way to respec your stats, short of using the Developer Mode cheat window in D2:DC.
Start the Developer Mode version of the game, load a save, hit F11 to open the cheat window and click the 'debug keys' button at the bottom of the right column to toggle them on. After that you can type in the text box 'setstat Strength 50', for example. Use 'Stamina' to change Spirit. Remove any equipment to check your base stats before modifying them, if you just want to swap strength and intelligence values.
