As expected, we got the trailer for Patch 4.2 during today’s Live Letter! You can check it out below:

The Patch itself is launching on January 30th (they were serious about that late January thing, huh?) and will be preceded by a 24-hour maintenance, as has been usual for any Patches that add Housing wards. I’m excited that we’re getting back to the Doman half of the Stormblood experience with regard to the Main Scenario, and they’ve got me a little worried for Gosetsu (one of my favorite characters) based on the trailer above. But, they also tend to cut the trailers in a way that tends to make things look a lot worse than they actually turn out to be, so I’m possibly worrying over nothing here.

Since this is the last Live Letter before the launch of 4.2, most of it was focused on previews of content for the Patch, including the usual suspects: a look at the new Trial with Byakko and at the new Omega Raid, Sigmascape, which looks to be taking most of its inspiration from Final Fantasy VI, the way Deltascape drew from Final Fantasy V. I was never a huge fan of FFVI (don’t get me wrong, it’s fine, but it’s far from my favorite FF title), so this doesn’t excite me nearly as much as it will almost every other FF fan on the planet, but it was also pretty expected.

Of course, we’re also going to be seeing Job adjustments, with changes coming for all three tanks, Black Mage, Machinist, Monk, Summoner, and the three healers. They didn’t go into too much detail on these, but it looks like Monk will be getting a slight buff, as will Black Mage, Dark Knight, Warrior, and Scholar, while Paladin, Machinist, and Summoner are getting some potency reductions. There may also be further changes in the official Patch Notes, but lately they’ve been they’ve been more thorough in the Live Letters about these things, so I’m not expecting any major surprises here.

Patch 4.2 is also going to be bringing six new Housing Wards per District, each with an accompanying subdivision. As we’d heard before, they’re going to be making some changes to the way purchasing Plots works. For starters, plots aren’t going to be immediately available when the Patch goes live, but instead they’ll be purchasable after one week. A new limit on Free Companies will require having at least 4 members to purchase land, and apparently, the purchase of Personal plots will be restricted until some time after the Patch (after they “evaluate” the demand).

The largest (and probably most important) changes, though, are twofold. Firstly, players are going to be limited to owning a single Private estate and a single Free Company estate per World per Service Account (I can’t imagine this is going to apply retroactively, however, so the effect of this probably won’t be immediate in the case of players who already own multiple houses). Secondly, the team has made a decision to largely put an end to the secondary Housing market by implementing an unspecified amount of time before relinquished Plots will go up for sale again. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, that’s likely going to mean the end of “plot-flipping” and will hopefully mean that Housing will be going to people who actually intend to use it.

We also learned that Elemental Resistances are going to be going away, including both the statistics as displayed in the character window and various items that interact with them, like consumables, materia, and mostly older gear from A Realm Reborn. This will mean some changes for Disciples of the Land, since both Miner and Botanist had some interaction with these stats for certain types of harvesting (the triggers that were formerly based on elemental resistances look like they’ll be moving to GP instead).

Judging by other comments, these changes are being made in anticipation of Eureka: Anemos, and though we didn’t get a lot of information about 4.25’s main content, what we did learn has me fairly hopeful. Elementals are going to play a big part in Eureka it seems, and through use of Magicite, we’re going to be able to adjust offensive and defensive elemental properties to (presumably) target specific types of Elementals. In Eureka, we’ll also be increasing our Elemental Level, giving the content a seemingly alternate advancement path, and (in a nod to older MMOs like Final Fantasy XI), once we hit a certain point in that advancement, deaths will actually reduce our Elemental Level.

The way Eureka looks based on this bit of info reminds me a lot of FFXI’s Abyssea content, which featured special Atma that enhanced the player’s statistics (in pretty powerful ways) while in Abyssea zones. Adding potentially meaningful penalties for death will also give the zone more of an old-school feel, and with the content being designed for both solo and party play (all the way up to Full Parties), I’m more hopeful than I was before that Eureka can capture something of what FFXIV has really been missing for me personally in a long time. Of course, this does leave me more excited for 4.25 than 4.2 itself, which isn’t especially ideal, so I’m really hoping 4.25 comes along sooner rather than later!

In addition to these major things, we also got to see some gear previews of what appears to be the Sigmascape gear and a probable new crafted glamour piece (a sweater!). They also gave us more details on the new Glamour Dresser system and previewed a new type of content that will involve us putting together outfits for the Weaver’s Guild Master, Redolent Rose, to earn MGP in the Gold Saucer. We’re also going to be seeing some items added to the armoire (like the Maid and Butler outfits from one of the Amazon Promotions—and hopefully the other ones, too!), so combined with the 200 items of virtual storage in the Glamour Dresser and the new Chocobo Saddlebags, we’ll be getting some more inventory leeway.

That covers about everything that stood out to me about today’s Live Letter. As usual, I probably missed some things, so if you’re curious you might want to check out the Update Thread on the Official Forums, too. We’re still about a week and a half from the launch of the Patch, so we may yet see some more previews to come on the Lodestone: hopefully we get to see some more new gear.