It is a forum problem. It thought it was my birthday a couple weeks ago. It's in June…

The Professor said:

That's funny, Professor; I was just coming here to comment on this very inconsistancy. I was all set to resign myself to Kate's newly-FAQ'd monster surge quirkiness when I came across that tidbit about the Warding of the Yellow Sign on my bus ride home (thank you FF for having everything in .pdf format). This does seem to be at odds with the ruling on Kate when she's at a gate that's not the source of the surge:

-Warding of the Yellow Sign on source of surge: Allocate all monsters and then cancel the ones at WotYS location.

-Kate on a different gate: Allocate all monsters as if Kate's gate does not exist.

Note, however, that when Kate is at the source of the surge, she IS more powerful than WotYS: she cancels the entire surge! The FAQ is missing a ruling on what, if anything, WotYS does when it's on a gate other than the one the surge is centered on. If it does the same thing there, then it is more powerful than Kate, which seems wrong. Maybe they're assuming we'll take the card's wording, "No monsters may appear via gates at this location," to mean that it doesn't do anything at all (are surge monsters coming out of all open gates, or just appearing on them? That's getting pretty deep into the Arkham semantics). Would have been nice to have this spelled out.

TC,

     After waiting this long for the FAQ, I agree it could have been a bit cleaner and clearer in a few areas.  I work with linguists and I was not-so-surprised to see a number of editing issues even in this FAQ ~ words missing, etc. 

     Anyway, I'm still of two minds on Kate when she's at the location of a Monster Surge.  Obviously, this would only happen when she's returned to Arkham and has an Explored Token while sitting on a gate when the Mythos Card reveals a gate opening and thus, a Monster Surge.  Should she really cancel the whole thing?  I don't know…during a Monster Surge, monsters are entering, ostensibly, from any gate…if Kate were at another gate she would only stop the ones attempting to appear there.  Maybe she should only prevent the ones attempting to appear at the primary surge location…I don't know, it's getting late. 

Having not read the entire FAQ yet, it appears to have muddied the water significantly in relation to this discussion.  The ruling makes 'sense' but seems to go against what (at least my) logic dictates about Winthrop's ability.  I think ultimately, that this ruling comes into question very rarely as and because of that fact I don't necessarily see this as a nerf to Kate as much as their way to interpret the rules.

I'll agree with The Professor that no unique item should be more powerful than an investigator.  In this case though the only difference (that I can see, and it's late) is that Kate will redirect a surging monster to another gate while Warding simply 'eats' the monster.  Since Kate can still move, prevent gates from opening and monsters from spawing in almost every other situation, I don't think she's less powerful.  The FAQ does make Kate weaker (only slightly) and Warding better, but I feel it's an almost negligible amount.