FoW quests & chest

As most of you know, if you do all 11 FoW quests, a reward chest is supposed to appear and you get a bunch of goodies.

Until yesterday I hadn't tried this. But, yesterday a Guildmate of mine was off work, so we decided to try the FoW quest run (with 6 heroes). Everything went just fine, and, after about 3 hours, "The Hunt" was the last quest we completed. When we killed the last Shard wolf, a box popped up saying the chest was in the Forge (I didn't know at the time where it would appear). As we headed for the Forge, suddenly another box popped up saying we had failed and would be returned to the outpost. ARRRRGGGHHH!!!!

Looking it up on Guildwiki afterwards, they said that if any friendly NPC dies, it's game over. Well, I sort of knew that, but didn't think it would happen after we had done the quests (and killed nearly everything). It did almost seem as though more monsters spawned after the last quest was finished, but I'm not sure.

Anywho - my question is, what is the usual method people use to complete these quests and get the chest rewards?
I'm thinking that next time we won't get any quest rewards from the Forgemaster until the end and then we'll be at the Forge and maybe have time to get the chest, but is there another/better way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Me and a guildie with 6 Heroes also cleared the Fissure of Woe yesterday, but no mysterious NPC deads for us.=s The guildie said there are sometimes groups patrolling around Rastigan's fortress that may aggro and kill the Griffons, maybe one of those patrols killed your Griffons? We killed all enemies in the first part just to be sure.=s

I've cleared FoW and later while walking around had some Shadow Beasts pop up and aggro onto Griffons (and kill them).

Almost did exactly the same thing myself the weekend before last with a couple of guildmates, but yours was possibly even worse!

We had done 10 of the 11 quests, cleared the path for the Forge Mage, and were walking back to the Tower of Strength paying no attention whatsoever to what we were doing because we had "done it" and only needed the mage to open the gates so we could kill the boss and that would have been it.

A group of Abysalls appeared from seemingly nowhere resulting in one dead Forge Mage as we were not close enough to save him. GAME OVER.

Basically, we got totally over confident and were just congratulating ourselves on doing it all and simply stopped watching what we were doing!

I have not been able to face going back again since failing it by 30 seconds LOL

Thanks for the heads up that the NPCs can still die after the chest drops though. I would not have expected that!

Well completed quests or not, if any NPC dies you fail, that has always been the case.

You got unlucky, but don't give up.