What did you find shark jumping? I see a lot of people who pick out a place where the story went bad or whatever, but usually I can't distinguish it from the previous stuff.

For me the big dividing point in the series was "Lord of Chaos". That was where the usual narrative structure of the individual books broke down and after that, they seemed more serialized and felt like there was less content. I didn't do word counts or anything, but it seemed like the print was larger with fewer pages. Also, they started taking longer to come out. I jumped on board after EotW & tGh were already published, as I read them together, and not long after that, the paperback for tDR and a few months later, tSR was released (and might possibly have been the first hardcover novel I ever purchased). tFoH & LoC came out roughly one year later. After that, there were longer delays between Jordan's releases, and it felt like there was less content when they finally did come out.

But that's publishing issues. As far as content goes, I did not see any downturn. I was disappointed in the pacing of CoT, but not what happened or the characterization and as far as I am concerned, KoD redeemed it to whatever extent that was necessary, by providing a conclusion to all the stuff CoT did not. Yeah, the pacing problem wasn't fixed, but it's also easy to see the rationale and why it might have seemed like a good idea. It didn't work, but at that point Rj had come too far to just throw it out and start over, like George Martin did with Dance with Dragons. Fixing it would have meant another extreme delay in what had been the longest yet in the series at two and a half years. But it didn't ruin the story as far as I am concerned. I thought in that period there was a little too much time spent in Ebou Dar, which I was never as thrilled with as RJ seemed to be, but there was still interesting character stuff going on.

All that being said, I would really be interested in specifics as to what went wrong with Path of Daggers, as opposed to Lord of Chaos or Crown of Swords or Crossroads of Twilight?