Joking? 100 is nowhere near enough to equip any gear. Even Casters, assuming they want a Spirit in a Shield, need 156 Str.
OP clearly is doing it wrong, can’t see his build so can’t point out where, but imo assassin is the safest class to play, between CoS good summon tanks BoS/Fade and mindblast… I never felt any pressure on an assassin pre hell gloams
Didnt die with assassin (trapsin) until very end of nightmare/start of hell (lightning immune…).
My Necro died instant at Nightmare act 3 to some mobs, but since it isnt hc i dont realy care(plus half afk because…u know…necro). And im not an old school player. It might be possible that you die, but actualy with a little res and def it should not happen. (im often to cheap with my pots…)
Nothing wrong with dying. I can happend easly even on normal.
Especially with SC charakters you automatically play less safe.
I’ve levelled 14 solo chars to end of Normal in D2R and no deaths. It’s pretty hard to die on Normal. Maybe at an act boss if you don’t know what to expect or if your build/gear really sucks or you play melee (lol?).
I have quite a few of those chars now at the end of Nightmare and I do not know of the difficulty spikes the OP is talking about. Apart from the odd pack of immunes on Nightmare I’d say difficulty has been rising rather gradually.
we are talking bout normal where if youre starting even sigon (75 str) is way enough so lets not talk bout gear lvl 40+ please 
And i said that im starting to put in vit. There is nowhere said that i wont put in str also 
Nothing wrong with playing melee, range combat is for cowards.
And unless you play chars self found, any char after the first propably get enough of a head start.
I wasn’t really knocking melee, I’ve never tried it. Heard it was bad.
Chaos normal on level is probably harder to do than NM & Hell. You probably have random gear getting you through & you aren’t that powerful yet. You likely wont have any runewords & if you do only the low level ones. Diablo isn’t much of an issue as you are only dealing with Diablo, his minions are a PITA for melee as there are so many of them. When you get cursed it’s probably best to run & pick off a few until you can manage the rest. Your merc will be no use either as they just die & you aren’t likely to have the right runewords for them either yet.
A lot of melee items require a lot of strength to use, some of them require a large balance of STR and Dex to use. Melee builds also gain a lot of damage from Strength, so once you’ve reached the life you’re comfortable with you might as well put more strength as it directly translates into more leech.
That said on my Axe Frenzy Barbarian I have 100 STR hard points and the rest is in Vitality (420 currently). Bowazons though have avoidance passives that give a huge amount of survival, and with gear/charms + cta you can hit roughly 1000 life, which is more than enough to allow you to pump ALL free points into Dexterity for more damage/leech.
Anyway my barb currently has 5k health with BO, I’ve killed Ubers with 3.5k. I like having that margin for error, so I can just facetank everything and reduce the chance of freak deaths, but higher strength would probably increase my farm rate, and is probably optimal in PVM.
my backup sorc recently ripped when I was lvling her, was too lazy to restart the game, cuz I didn’t feel like getting shadowbanned, on having souls/gloams on hell.
well guess I got to level another one, and just restart it, even if it means being shadowbanned.