I've always thought that speed should greatly affect the defensive and offensive abilities of player character and monsters. For example the quicklings are fast enough to carefully examine the player's armor, and stab the player directly between the helmet and chest plate, but in ADOM they just bash the heavily armored player several times, usually without any effect. On the other hand, the player with 160 speed is not nimble enough to dodge the sloooooow bash of moloch when it is its turn to attack.

The other thing is, when you are surrounded by horde of monsters you should be hit eventually, no matter how fast you are - you just can't block everyone around with one shield and one sword. IIRC in ADOM there was only the negative modifier to +tohit when PC was fighting with more than 3 monsters (without the courage skill).

I think that speed and number of monsters should be much more significant. Maybe there should be some bonuses to DV/tohit when fighting with very slow monsters and this bonus should be decreased greatly when fighting against more than 1-2 opponent (that number might be affected by concentration skill).

I hope you get the general idea. Any comments are welcome.