"The Dark Host" mission issues

The First Ward mission, "The Dark Host", needs some tweaking, methinks.

Specifically, I think it needs some sort of immediate "fail condition" if one of the NPCs you're supposed to find dies. I was doing this mission for the first time a couple days ago and ran into an extremely annoying issue. I met up with Blind Makwa and led him to his Spirit Ward. Mistress Nadia was waiting there. Upon attempting to set up Makwa's ward, I was attacked by a group of enemies. At the same time, Nadia decided to run off and engage a completely different group (or perhaps she was ambushed), something I didn't notice until I'd finished with the group I was fighting. By that time, it was too late — Nadia was down.

Here's the first problem: There was nothing to indicate that Nadia's death (5 minutes into the mission) meant I could not complete the mission. I finished setting up Makwa's ward, then located Cerulean and Vanessa DeVore and got their wards set up, and then finally, after much hunting, located Nadia's ward. Whereupon I got the "You can't complete this objective yet" message when I clicked on it. I'm assuming this was because I hadn't led Nadia to the ward. And I couldn't lead her there because she was dead. So I'm mildly annoyed that I wasted my time completing all of the following objectives to no effect, and that the game just let me continue with the mission. I couldn't complete the mission, and exiting and speaking with Blind Makwa offered me neither "failure" text nor the option to autocomplete the mission. All I could do was log out for a while so that I could log back in and Abandon the mission.

That leads to the second problem. After abandoning the mission, I spoke to Makwa to reacquire it and try again, only to discover that I can't just reacquire the mission; instead, I have to redo the previous mission, "Splitting Souls" a mission that can only be completed when it's nighttime in First Ward. So if it's daytime, I'll need to stand around First Ward waiting for the sun to go down. Either that, or go back to Primal Earth and run Radio or Tip missions, checking back into First Ward in between missions to see if it's nighttime.

Suggested fixes:

If an NPC dies in "The Dark Host", fail the mission right then instead of letting the player continue on pointlessly.

Let the player who failed abandon and then reacquire "The Dark Host" instead of making them go back to the previous mission.

That is exactly what happened to me. Nadia kept killing herself every time. I still haven't completed it.

Instead of abandoning it, though, I just grabbed one of the repeatable missions, selecting that as my "team task", and then re-selecting The Dark Host. It didn't restart the entire mission that way, just the second half.

they must have changed the mish then, every time i have run it all of the npc allies in that mish have been invincible (ie they could be attacked but they never actually lost any hp) so it would have been impossible for any of them to have died for a mish fail

If they were ever invulnerable, then they've definitely changed it. The NPCs you have to escort are Lieutenant-level characters who are cheerfully aggroing every enemy on the map. I can only do so much to keep them alive when they're trying to take on multiple Bosses at the same time.

Nor my Staff/Dark Brute

I bet Trick Arrow defenders have no problem, what with getting Healing Arrow and all.