I had two problems with this particular guildleve for Horizon.
I actually found it quite entertaining at first, running around taking out little Lala assassins. It was actually quite fun. We had the stars set a little high for our level, so it was challenging, but not terrible.
....and then the little bugger ran off....and kept running....and running.
Really? Did they have to make the last assassin run for five minutes straight to the other side of the map? Kind of felt that chase was a little ridiculous. I'm not a big fan of the mobs running off in the middle of a fight to begin with, but I've gotten used to it. Or, I thought I had until this guy.
However, besides the really long jog we had to take, my party and I knew what to expect at the end, since there's really no surprise or variation in what happens after a mob runs. Mob runs -> Two new mobs appear -> Three mobs attack your party, but you can only engage one of them or risk losing SP. A clumsy, mostly hated system, but I've grown used to it.
The real fun began after our party got jumped by the three assassins and completely wiped. Instead of wiping us then resetting, the assassins, in true assassin form I guess, followed us from their spawn point, all the way back to the camp where we had returned to. Since they had somehow 'engaged' us from half the map away after we'd already died and respawned, we couldn't turn down the stars to something we could handle. The assassin then proceeded to spawn camp us, consistently one-shotting us in our weakened state after reviving.
Eventually, I guess the assassin became bored, because he wandered off, allowing us to finally turn down the level of the leve. Since we only had 5 minutes left at that point, we turned it down to 1-star so that we could just finish the leve, then went off to hunt down the assassins again.
We started by returning to the spawn point where we were ambushed to dispose of the two assassins there that had popped up when the original mob ran. We took care of those easily and went off to search for the last assassin before time ran out.
Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found. His icon on the map was gone, so there was no indication of where he could have been. We split up and searched in different directions, but the guy had vanished. Needless to say, we ended up failing the leve.
Not really sure if there's a point to this post, since it's mostly venting. It's kind of entertaining in retrospect, but was really frustrating at the time. I really hope they look into changing a lot of these mechanics for some of the leves, though. Something more exciting than 'kill 5 mobs, start to kill 6th mob, 6th mob runs, 2 more mobs appear, kill mobs 6, 7, and 8.' And maybe less running. Or no running at all. Who decided that mechanic was a good idea? X.x
Hell, I think I'd appreciate it if they just did something simple like, "Mob 5 calls in reinforcements" and the two extra mobs just jumped you. At least you wouldn't lose your progress on the last mob you were fighting. Not to mention you wouldn't have to waste time jogging aimlessly through the desert.