I hired a prayer merc in normal, when when I got to nightmare, and looked at my hirelings advanced stats, his prayer aura was replaced with thorns. Just to confirm this happened, I switched back to normal with the same char, and indeed, my hirelings aura was now prayer.
This is very inconvenient because it means that a might aura hireling from nightmare, will have blessed aim aura in hell.
This is not a change that is listed on the list of changes to the game, so I assume it is a bug.