The Reason for the New SMN Gap Closer

Stupid stuff here, but I thought I would share, because this revelation has me rolling on the floor laughing. It took me until today to realized that SMN actually performs many melee attacks now, and I do not mean just the Ifrit combo. Since the majority of SMN attacks now are instant cast, SMN has plenty of opportunity to perform auto attacks. The damage is not much, but, screwing around, I was able to increase my DPS by about 30 by staying in melee range of my targets. So, yeah, if you are a sucker for optimal DPS, put that new gap closer to better use and incorporate more book whacks into your battles :D

Really missed opportunity for them to have a whip instead of a book. Like Rydia.

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Originally Posted by Bonkleberry

Stupid stuff here, but I thought I would share, because this revelation has me rolling on the floor laughing. It took me until today to realized that SMN actually performs many melee attacks now, and I do not mean just the Ifrit combo. Since the majority of SMN attacks now are instant cast, SMN has plenty of opportunity to perform auto attacks. The damage is not much, but, screwing around, I was able to increase my DPS by about 30 by staying in melee range of my targets. So, yeah, if you are a sucker for optimal DPS, put that new gap closer to better use and incorporate more book whacks into your battles :D

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I actually saw this mentioned in sch guides, the books have always had unusually high base damage for caster weapons and with the recent stat squish has made this vaguely relevant again, especially in lower level content.

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Originally Posted by Awarewolf

Really missed opportunity for them to have a whip instead of a book. Like Rydia.

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I've always hated the book and have been saying this since 2.0. Scholar really did us dirty. If not the whip, the air racket

Book Whack those meters! its a wee dps increase. maybe it has a future. might as well pick up the extra numbers not sure there is much difference in spamming your GCDs standing in melee or ranged. I say book whack away.

You know I thought SMN was given TWO gap closer moves, but nah it's 1 gap closer and 1 melee. It's often after using my gap closer and the boss said nope, "Imma move further." Guess I'll use me feet to gap close again. So much better if they could combine the dash and smash into one move and give us two charges.

Sage's melee animations make the end of the story have much more meaning, lmao

Fun fact ... you always were supposed to be standing in melee unless you need to do a mechanic, melee or not

The irony that the book auto has better damage than the rapier auto...

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Originally Posted by Aiscence

Fun fact ... you always were supposed to be standing in melee unless you need to do a mechanic, melee or not

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I thought crowding the melee range with casters was a bad idea, makes it harder for the melee classes to actually see everything they need to.

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Originally Posted by Atamis

I've always hated the book and have been saying this since 2.0. Scholar really did us dirty. If not the whip, the air racket

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I hate books with a passion. They are the most boring weapon of them all. It doesn't help that SMN's books 80% of the time end up sharing a model with SCH.

I wish they would at least step outside of the box more... Like, what if one book was a wood tablet when held a scroll would float up? Or a book literally being a crystal - in lore they are literal repositories of knowledge.

Honestly the most out of the box book we ever had is FF13's collab weapon that is a Boomerang that somehow unsheathes into some kind of virtual book. That is pretty neat.

I would love it if they finally split sch and SMN in 7.0 and give SMN a new weapon.

I’m not sure if they would give us a whip, but I would honestly take a wand or 1 handed rod.

BLU isn’t even a real job anyways so just give us their weapon.

Or come up with something totally unique like they did for Astro and Sage.

Maybe some kind of cool crystal ball or something.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I thought crowding the melee range with casters was a bad idea, makes it harder for the melee classes to actually see everything they need to.

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It was to my understanding that certain mechanics only targeted ranged and therefore you wanted to give Melee space in case you get targeted.

I'm probably wrong though.

Book smack was the final DoT in ARR. Now it's the only dot.

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Originally Posted by Maxilor

It was to my understanding that certain mechanics only targeted ranged and therefore you wanted to give Melee space in case you get targeted.

I'm probably wrong though.

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In those cases you might want to pre-position before that mechanic comes up, but it's not like the game pulses random aoes at people just to force spreading all the time.

Unless a specific mechanic forces you to move, staying in melee means you're in range of all the buffs.

As for the visability question, most casters will be at the corners of the hitbox, so ranged can be 'due south' or even in the hitbox itself just fine, depending on incoming mechanics.