I thought this episode was better than the last few.
- Guts being effectively broken by being unable to land a hit on Griffith and focusing on that aspect as opposed to Casca's recapture makes some sense to me. As has already been mentioned, I'm assuming that Guts felt that he'd be able to do some damage to Griffith considering all of the dramatic battles Guts had won up to this point and considering that Griffith had taken a physical form again. In the previous episode, I felt that Studio Gaga had dropped the ball by not having Guts say something along the lines of, "... once again, I failed to protect her. Even now, I couldn't land a single blow..." which would've tied Casca's capture in with Guts' failure to hit Griffith, but this episode has me thinking that the intent was always to have Guts get broken over the idea that he was still effectively powerless compared to Griffith. I don't know if his inability to attack Femto back in Volume 3 would've played a role here, since he tried to attack Griffith at the Hill of Swords, but never got a chance to see how that would turn out thanks to Zodd (hell, Zodd protecting Griffith could have furthered a belief in Guts that Griffith was vulnerable now).
- Given that Molda is a witch of Elfhelm, I don't find it that much of a stretch that she would know about the Berserk armor, or that she would assume Schierke doesn't know all there is to know about it (since, from her perspective, Schierke is an outsider).
- I'm assuming Puck and Ivalera did not disappear because they were interested/immersed in the outside world, whereas those that disappeared likely had no interest in the outside world. If it turns out that Molda is the only magic user from Elfhelm to not escape, I assume this would be the reasoning there as well.
- Emotions are weird things, and grief can turn into rage rather quickly. Everyone being on edge with regards to the Berserk armor wasn't all that surprising to me.
That said, all of these are just reasons that I came up with, and clearly weren't communicated at all in the actual episodes, so there are definitely holes that Team Gaga should fill in the future.