Off the top of my head I can think of two situations where you can fail arun in such a way that you're not dead, but just don't have a way to win.
- Bringing two shard bombs to Roarmulus Twins. (Take a shot every time Zeddy rants about Shard Bombs.)
- Bringing a pure shadow weapon to Vanaduke, getting to the final state where he's 100% immune to shadow.
You can sort of escape these now thanks to Battle Sprites, but a new player could still end up in this situation if they're sufficiently poorly informed and only has a Maskeraith that hasn't yet learned its third ability. Even with sprite abilities, even if you're not completely stuck, you're gonna have a bad, dragged out time.
I know there are some situations where a trigger can bug out and cause gates to not open, making you stuck in that manner, but this is a different thing. In these instances, the design of the game forbids the player from proceeding without crafting/bringing different gear entirely.
What do you guys think of it? Is it fine? Should the appropriate missions give warnings?
Here's another one, although it's not about gear: You're soloing Vanaduke, ignoring the shadow fire, and you get trapped by it. In fact, once I had to quit the mission after I killed Vanaduke, because there was nothing else to be done.
Anyway, to respond to your points: On first glance it seems reasonable to warn players. But how often do players try it? Is it worth the cost of having 99.9999% of players read/ignore text, even though that cost is tiny per player?
Ideally there would be code, which would display the warning only if the player is attempting the impossible task. Grey Havens, please add this code, *after* producing new content and squashing bugs.