A mystery of patch 4.2.0 solved!

db0ssman · October 2018

It seems a lot of people who play NB were baffled at the developer note for path of darkness which said that nerfing the ability into the ground was going to help every class bring something to the table. Now with the go-slow 2018 update, it makes a little more sense. Basically, every major expedition ability in the game got a nerf to major expedition, except for path of darkness and morphs. They made path of darkness (especially) and refreshing path more useless in the 90% of pve where that doesn't matter, but at least we now know what the comment was supposed to mean.

Silver_Strider · October 2018

It still only lasts 2 seconds outside of the Path vs 4 seconds with most forms of Major Expedition and even then, you'd want Major Expedition in solo content to move from point A to point B in a more timely manner so unless you have a pocket NB that will spam Path for you, it doesn't really help in any meaningful way. It's not the end of the world though since you'll still be able to go to your location within a timely manner, it'll just take more casts of your Major Expedition buff than before Murkmire.

The only real nerf was to Swift and that isn't a huge loss since we only had it for ~6 months so it's not as though it was there since base game and is just now getting nerfed (RIP Warhorn).

db0ssman · October 2018

Don't get me wrong. I think it is still a mostly useless ability now with how they nerfed it, I'm just saying based on their view with the recent changes the comment makes more sense.

The only time I can think of people using path much is in pvp if you are in a group with 3 or 4 NB and they all drop twisting path, you could have a whole section of ground where your team will have a big speed advantage. There is also a couple of dungeon bosses (falkreath hold, ICP, & cradle of shadows main bosses come to mind) where moving together in a line faster while healing will make a difference.