@Garlyle
Maybe it was my fault for expecting that particular class quest to teach me something useful. The knife-throwing was useful for picking out the mobs at the site one by one, so I could get to the quest location safely. I should not have expected more.

@Lollie
That's an interesting idea! I may try kiting in the future. Although I think for example Pugilists will also need to get pretty close.

@JoeDono
Thank you for this advice. It looks like you can try to do a class quests in several ways, but only 1 or 2 of those will work. Using 'Hide' in that earlier class quests was actually useful, and I didn't wipe on that ^^;
It's just that I'm worried that I'm already failing at the low-level stuff. It's only going to get more difficult.