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The storyline of GW2 has its good points, this is undeniable. The first ten levels, and their many different storylines, are very well crafted and make your character feel alive and important in a living world. You are doing all the stuff, moving up the ranks, finding fun things along the way. It's great. You have this mentor, the character of DE, above you. Which is... sort of fine. The storyline progresses well until DE characters, the so-called iconics, start taking a bigger role. Here you can see all the shortcomings of the ANet writers - most iconics are terrible.
They all have two things in common: they act in a Mary Sue-ish sort of way when they're alone, but they behave exactly like 7 y/o kids when they're together, with the men and the asura insulting each other while the girls cry and complain. This is absolutely on purpose, which is worrying to say the least. They are supposed to be the greatest adventurers of their time, yet they are completely clueless. I know this is supposed to be the starting situation, but it's really horribly done - because those five characters basically behave the same way, they're copycats; the only difference being the gender differentiation. Could you picture Logan reacting differently than Rytlock or Zojja, had he been in that situation? Of course not. Zojja would have made the same mistake Logan made and she showed it. Eir and Caithe are really echoing each other's words, too.
So: problem 1 is that among five iconics we get two personalities and they're both either childish or Mary Sue. Heck, Cynn alone has more personality than the 5 combined and is childish in a less stupid way.
Then it gets to your storyline, after 30, which is composed of two parts. The first one is you meeting the only well written character in the storyline, your order mentor, and seeing him/her die at Claw Island for no reason whatsoever other than dramatic tension and DM fiat. Thanks for that. The second part of your storyline is executing what the DMPC says you have to do. Said DMPC is, of course, Trahearne.
Trahearne deserves a paragraph on his own because of his uncanny ability to detroy all that is good in a storyline. He is Mary Sue, and he is the classic bad DMPC we all encountered once in our DnD experiences. On top of that, he is in the top 3 of worst written characters I've ever seen - apathetic, never showcasing any strong character trait, condescending. He just feels so indifferent and bland, you really do forget about him. And yet occasionally he goes and uses 3 elites at the same time, or does DM-fiat tricks. You could forgive him if he had some good writing, like having a flamboyant/extra depressed/always furious/hectic/mad scholar/sardonic/badass serious personality. There, I listed seven personalities he could have had, it took me three minutes, and I'm not even a pro writer. They chose to make him this bad. Why? To make up for the fact they couldn't write epic lines for our character, most likely - so they decided to make the DMPC even blander, so our character wouldn't get overshadowed.
At the end of a series of fully linear quests without plot twist whatsoever, you kill the dragon. Woo. I could see it coming 50 levels ago, thanks Trahearne. Now die in a fire, I want my order mentor back.