More Red Posts, more Wintersday info

There have been a bunch more red posts on the forums detailing what we can expect in the upcoming patch on December 14th for Wintersdays. The first post come from, Anthony Ordon, with respect to Wintersday resources.

No, there’s no resource nodes. Something else will take the place of ad-hoc, holiday content on the go. There are new crafting recipes, but the components for those will come from the rewards gained by playing any holiday content. (Forum Post)

He then clarified with,

I’m saying that there will be new crafting components specific to Wintersday. To get them, you play Wintersday stuff. Activities, events, etc. We took a very different approach to Wintersday crafting than Halloween. There’s a lot more recipes and we made some of our unique skins considerably more easy to get. (Forum Post)

I am not exactly sure what this means, but what I think I am taking away from this is that simply, there will be no mining nodes like Candy Corn for Wintersday. All the Wintersday unique crafting mats will be available from doing the various events. There will still be a need for current materials, but all the new mats will be obtainable from the Wintersday events only.

Next up, again from Anthony, we learn that there will be no high level content for the Wintersday content. Specifically he said,

No, you can be any level to participate in any of the main stage Wintersday content. And yes, there are both level-appropriate and level independent rewards. (Forum Post)

He then followed up by saying,

In general I would not expect difficult combat challenges in combat updates. The reception of including such content with the Halloween update was very poor. 

Fortunately, holiday events are not the only format of content update that will be added to the game. We can still add those challenges with future updates in the coming months and years ahead. (Forum Post)

Basically, what he is saying is that Anet wants to be inclusive for this special seasonal events, thus they will remain accessible by people of all levels.

Next we have a pair of posts (here, and here) by Jon Peters outlining buffs to a two signets that grant movements speed, namely, Signet of Air and Signet of the Locust. He also speaks of more reliable swiftness for mesmers here. Also from Jon Peters, is a thread about more changes to the Ranger, namely to the way pets targets.

There were also a number of posts telling of fixes to story bugs, event bugs, and even Keg Brawl achievements. Also, two posts by Jon Peters showing how certain abilities, Faithful Strike and Vigorous Shouts, stats are calculated (here and here). There are too many to detail here, so head over to the Dev Tracker and scan the list of those that interest you.