NPCs die too fast.
Friendly NPC AI is abysmal, which certainly doesn’t help. The only time they’re effective at doing anything except dying is when there’s a critical mass of them zerging and spamming debuffing conditions onto a single target.
I can understand many of the DE NPC’s being hapless. That’s their shtick: you’re the hero and they’re the distressed party. But every single NPC should not be standing around waiting for a poison cloud to kill them while they get focus-fired by the 15 guys they aggro’d at half-health and without any backup. That’s just silly.
That poor sailor in Cursed Shore who needs help burning bodies is the worst. She will quite literally sit in poison clouds firing her pistol, and will die every single time a rotmouth wave spawns because she can’t be bothered to move 5 ft. in any direction.
This is terrible in personal story missions. As a charr, my squishy caster warband-mate insists on always being up close and personal to the big group of mobs that I dodged back and swapped to my bow to avoid. I have to rez her after EVERY fight. If there are any other NPCs in the mission, they’ll die 70% of the time too, but nowhere near as often as Eury does.