Seriously, I have
no idea what happened. The player declared which Power was being used, and nobody had any idea how to narrate it, so we just moved on with the game and I think I stopped using that Power since it left gaps in the narrative.
Dire Radiance - "You cause a shaft of brilliant, cold starlight to lance down
from above, bathing your foe in excruciating light. The nearer
he moves toward you, the brighter and more deadly the light
becomes."
Eldritch Blast - "You fire a bolt of dark, crackling eldritch energy at your foe."
Eyebite - "You glare at your enemy, and your eyes briefly gleam with bril-
liant colors. Your foe reels under your mental assault, and you
vanish from his sight."
Hellish Rebuke - "You point your finger, and your foe is scoured in hellish flames stoked by your own anger and pain. If you are injured, the flames
burst into life one more time before they fade away."
Those are all the 4e PHB1 Warlock at-will powers flavor texts. I don't see any of them as inadequate. They're typical of flavor texts for 4e powers in general. Its not at all clear to me that these things were designed 'mechanics first'. The mechanics generally reflect these descriptions reasonably well.
TBH I've had this discussion MANY times with people who make this type of statement. There is simply no fact behind it. Every 4e power has a description and the mechanics reflect that description, every one. Maybe a few of them are not all that evocative or feel poorly written or ambiguous, there are 1000's and 1000's of powers, so surely the quality varies to some degree. Still I know of only a very few powers where the mechanics might, in some situations, leave you asking questions.
However NOTHING in the 4e rules or any other associated material EVER instructs the players or the DM to ignore narrative and apply the rules unconditionally. The DM is described as the arbiter of how the mechanics work and is explicitly granted permission to rule in any way, or to change the narrative in order to achieve whatever is desired at the table. That some people chose to play the game in a certain way, refusing to ever reconcile mechanics and narrative, and then heaped scorn on the game for their issues is utterly puzzling to me. All they had to do was play how they wanted. It was that simple.
At least with a sword, you know that you cut the enemy. You might have slashed or stabbed it, in any number of ways - you might have hit armor, or skin - but you definitely applied the sword directly to the goblin and then the goblin died. This Power didn't give you anywhere near that level of detail. The best we could figure out was that maybe I gave the goblin a funny look, before it keeled over.
It's an issue of degree to the abstraction. There are an infinite number of ways that you can kill a goblin by attacking it with a sword, even if you don't have the freedom to narrate it as shooting lasers or causing the goblin to have a sudden heart-attack. At our table, getting hit by a weapon only meant that you got hit by the weapon, and you could still narrate the specifics as unique. Likewise, burning hands might require the same gestures with every cast, but the flames could catch the enemy directly in the chest or the face, or barely hit a limb as it quickly recoils.
Yeah, I don't see a difference here. The real difference I see is that 4e powers have more specific effects in general. They inflict keyworded damage, often have fairly significant effect lines, and tend to emphasize their mechanical resolution more than some old-time spells. 4e is VERY heavily dependent on keywords, and this is something many people seem to forget. Hellish rebuke doesn't TALK about fire, beyond mentioning 'hellish flames', but it has the Fire keyword, and does fire damage. If it were used on a wooden object, presumably it would burn that object, possibly igniting it and causing it to continue to burn (I would treat this as a page 42 type use of the power). This doesn't have to be spelled out in every power as it did in AD&D where very fire spell indicated how or if it set things on fire (if you were lucky, many just left it to the whim of the DM).
I do get that 4e has a 'style' of description and that its powers evoke a certain type of imagery in general, which is often somewhat different from that of AD&D magic, but I'm not convinced they are 'detached from narrative' as some would put it. 4e just gave you a lot more freedom to think about how the two relate.