I played as a warrior too. Feranur makes a lot of good points and even brought up some things I didn't know, but I'd like to add from my own personal experience too. I managed to beat the game at level 26 and have beat the original a couple times before at lower levels.
* Keep a town portal active before you go into the fray. That way you don't have to worry about casting the spell and panicking/messing up. You'll risk wasting mana, but towards endgame it's better.
* Armor Class is incredibly useful towards the end. If you can find platemail with +100% or more armour, get it. Same with the shield, it really adds up.
* Ele Res is pretty easy to max out, so do it. Combined with a high AC, it mostly becomes a race of "who can wear the other one down first?"
* I agree with Feranur's point on dexterity and having a good To-Hit. I got lucky towards end-game and picked up a sword with +49% hit & +116% damage + 7 damage added and ended up beating Diablo with a 122% To-Hit, but if you get the sidequest to get Griswold's blade, do it. It's one of the best swords in the game, which leads me to my next point.
* Do all the sidequests you can. The rewards are largely valuable. Granted there is some random assignment (
see here ), there are some particularly good warrior items (the Veil of Steel is especially good). Worst case scenario, you can sell it and get a nice amount of currency.
* Items with +all attributes are very useful, but they should come third to maxing out your Ele Res and your ToHit% (though keep in mind +all = +dex = +tohit, so experiment and find a middle ground).
* If you can get a ring or armor with Faster/Fastest hit recovery, I would consider keeping one in your inventory so you don't get stunlocked. This caused a huge amount of frustration in my early-game, but once I got an item with faster hit recovery, it got easier.
* If you do decide to pursue magic, reading multiple copies of a spellbook increases the spell's level, and one of the consequences of that is reduced spell cost.
* 1h + shield > 2h all the way in this game.