dave2008
Legend
4E was heavily reliant on the grid just based on the powers. Could you play without it? Sure but the default expectation was a grid and the language of squares vs say feet/ft. It was basically to get you to buy the D&DM which if you read the credits on the rule books was developed by the same people who did 4E (Heinsoo etc).
They basically wanted everyone playing and paying online VTT, and buying the minis IRL. Some people compared 4E to WoW presumably because encounter powers are like cooldowns (IDK I didn't play WoW), but WoW took a chunk of the D&D playerbase its one reason 3.5 died so quick (in print 4 years, + d20 crash of 2004). Felt more like Advanced D&D Minis to me than WoW or a video game- AD&DM. Combat length in early 4E was also similar to a game of D&DM- 30-45 minutes. Kind of meant you could only get in 2 or 3 fights in a typical session of 3-4 hours (unless combat was all you did) vs 4+. Long fights are all right on occasion not the default. Our longest was 2 hours in 2E but it involved hundreds of beings in a 27 hour session.
You can't really plausibly claim there was not a heavy emphasis on minis over even 3.x. AD&D if you read it these days says something like "you can even use minis if you want". Playing 4E without minis would not work that well in most cases except maybe for certain classes who picked certain powers that avoided push/pull effects and things like that. You would have to go out of your way to build PCs avoiding things like that which would be difficult using just the 4E PHB. Technically you could play without minis (well more a grid), would not call it a good idea most of the time.
I disagree, but it is probably because I came from playing 1e so I already knew how to do it TotM style. For me, there is nothing that makes a close blast 6 more difficult to visualize than a 30-foot cone. But maybe that is just me and my group. If there was an emphasis on grids and minis, it was easy to ignore.