Thanks for the details on how it works @Flooter and @Maximuuus.
Sure, his jump+move is 11m, but his regular move is already 9m. So Gale is spending a bonus action to move an additional 2m. Which, hey, might be just what you need to get in range!
It feels like the AI plays around Gale’s move+attack range radius, consistently hanging 70 feet away from him. Hence, jump isn’t just 2 feet of extra movement, it’s the exact right amount of movement to get into spell range.
On the one hand, I like that the AI seems to be smart in this way.
On the other hand, this turns Extra Jump Movement into even
more of an exploit. If the AI is coded to try to stay just outside of ranged/spellcasters, but you can bypass that too-far-distance by Jumping, then you're taking advantage of a limitation of the AI. Jumping every turn becomes mandatory, which is boring and silly.
The worst part of jump, to me, is that it costs movement to create movement, but the game won’t let you plan around the tipping point where PCs don’t have enough movement left to jump.
This should be changed. You should be able to hover over an enemy with a ranged attack, and the game should use silhouettes to tell you how much movement you'd need to hit them (if you can). This should include extra movement from Jumping, as jumping--and the extra movement you get--seems like a core feature of the game atm. Alternatively, just make jumping cost 1 foot of movement per foot jumped so we can avoid this problem entirely.
