Jumping it is even worse than blocking it, though? At least when blocking it, some attacks (new Horizontal Slash) can actually punish it. Ninja's just kind of out of luck on block, there's not much they can really do before the recovery ends. Same when you evade it. In most situations, for most responses, the move is completely safe.
I'm not sure what you mean by it being predictable because of range - Wizard has a lot of other options at any given range, and the range of the attack itself can be adjusted in a pretty huge window to preempt a lot of possible responses.