How about a mode in which you have a time limit ? The Hero is stricken by an incurable disease which will take his life in 5 thousand turns. Alternatively there should be some other kind of penalty for staying in the same place for too long. I think spamming space to regen mana or to wait for the Archeology cooldowns shouldn't be viable.
(1) Everyone has access to the space bar (or the key binder to make it some other key, in the case that your space bar is broken) (2) Monsters constantly spawn and can show up without warning if you do that for long (3) The anvil recharge skill works once per anvil, the XP for an artifact skill has a low enough cooldown that you won't need to just wait in one spot, and the artifact changing skill is random enough that someone might be waiting 500 turns to change it to what they want (long enough for an army of flying monsters, in the case that they jumped to an island) Still, I haven't seen the leaderboards so I don't know if they have a time stat or not. It'd be cool if on said leaderboard, it showed how many turns they took and how much time it took to play through.
While an interesting idea, lots of builds are dependent on waiting. Especially the heavily mana dependent ones. For them "spamming space to regen mana" isn't a luxury, but a necessity. Also, ranged fighters are often required to "kite" mobs around. Since one step takes the same amount of time as one melee-fighter's attack, they'll be at an enormous disadvantage. So I don't think this is a viable game-mode.
There already is a penalty for staying in the same place for too long. One time I locked myself in a store to play around with archaeology, and when I opened the door back up, the game had made an impromptu monster zoo there. I felt like Justin Beiber opening his front door and there are thousands of 13 year old girls waiting to assault him.
That is pretty fitting BloodyMess, considering your name. Waiting in one place, your likely to not be left alone over an extended amount of time, as other have stated here. I just dont see the time limit idea being very good, or working out, as luck comes into play with this game
Nobody seems to get the point of a time limit mode. If you choose to play a time limit mode and decide to make a char that needs to take forever (i.e. a kiter or mp user), you are doing it wrong.
Self impose it. Beat the game without every hitting space, or do it in an hour. The only build that would work for this "mode" is the one I made a thread about, which just leaps and teleports it way to Dredmor at level 5 and kicks his ass with wands.
