I have seen considerable debates as to what the relationship of Essentials is to 4e; whether it is a separate edition, part of 4e, or, as you say, a "betrayal".
My take:
For the existing 4e player it is a set of awkwardly packaged splats (the 2 Heroes books) with some duplicated material (the reprinted races, and some reprinted feats, in the 2 Heroes books), plus some good errata (the MV) plus some stealth errata (some new feats that render some old feats otiose) plus a helpful reprinting of the core action resolution mechanics (the Rules Compendium).
Whether the splat material is any good is a further debate (witness Obryn and Neonchameleon vs Tony Vargas). I don't have a very strong view either way.
For the new would-be 4e player, it is a very poorly packaged set of introductory rulebooks, with massive amounts of duplication (some rules are restated 4 times, across the two Heroes book, the Rules Compendium and the DM book) and ridiculously wordy flavour text.
I think it is obviously
not a new edition in any substantive sense: same mechanics but for some errata, intended to play alongside the old stuff, etc - this is even more obvious with subsequent supplements like Heroes of the Feywild. From the marketing point of view it was meant to be a new, more accessible presentation for new players, but if it succeeded at that then I'm surprised at how low the threshold for success in that respect is! Given what a packaging shambles it is by any objective measure.
It has the same AEDU format as every other PHB class- it is not actually simpler in mechanics, as was the fighter of prior editions.
I don't agree with that. The powers of a PHB ranger are generally (not completely - they have some immediate actions) easier to resolve than the powers of (say) a warlock or wizard: lot's of damage, not many complicated effects. And nothing comparable to a fighter's combat challenge or combat superiority.
The comparison would be 2 1st level AD&D wizards, one an MU with magic missile, the other an illusionist with phantasmal force. Same resource structure - but is any going to try and tell me that that illusionist is as easy to play as that MU?
Telling people that they can only perform a certain action if they have a power card and selected it during character creation is a limitation. Telling people they are "out of" a certain maneuver and cannot attempt it until they rest is a limitation. That's what powers are. Your fighter already had the ability to try anything you could think of; it's a make-believe game.
I don't really get this. In Gygax's AD&D only rangers can surprise on a 1 to 3, only monks and thief-acrobats can ablate falling damage. So some capacities in the fiction - being sneakier, being able to roll with a fall - are limited by class. That's what a class-based system is. If the player of a fighter in AD&D says 'I want us to make-believe that my fighter rolled with the fall', I would expect the GM to decline the invitation.
I'm saying you can hit and deal damage, and the ally can move. You might even crit and deal double damage. The outcomes (hit point damage and movement) are the same.
I don't agreee with this, and it's interesting in the context of various comments upthread about multiple attacks.
In a game of round-based combat, everyone can attack two foes, of course. You just have to take two rounds to actually get to roll the d20 against each (but nothing stops you narrating your swings and parries against both of them in the abstract combat round - especially the AD&D 1 minute round). Multiple attacks just increases the number of d20 rolls you get.
The significance of a power that lets you hit and slide enemies isn't that it changes the fiction. Just as a multiple attack ability in AD&D or 3E doesn't change the fiction. But like those abilities, it interacts with the abstraction of combat rounds. Widespread use of out-of-turn movement or attacks is, in fact, a major innovation in 4e, in my view, compared to earlier editions of D&D. It allows round-based, turn-by-turn combat to be used without creating such an impression of a stop-motion world.
Moving allies is a rather odd concept. Characters have always been able to move. Replacing the ability of an ally to move himself is one of those quasi-magical things that make people look cross-eyed at the game; it's not clear to me what's happening there.
What's happening is that the ally is moving. It's nothing to do with magic - it would only look like magic if you assume that the fiction's natural behaviour is stop-motion. As soon as you recognise that stop-motion resolution is an abstraction, the rationale for out-of-turn movement and out-of-turn attacks becomes pretty clear. Mechanically, they have an interesting dynamic (not unlike multiple attacks in AD&D and 3E, as I noted above). And in the fiction, they represent the fluidity of combat (just as multiple attack rolls represent the skill of a combatant).
