Info is coming from an event only in Japan on a paid niconico stream so not a lot of high quality media to post. Will keep updating for a few hours.

Details however:

• World of Darkness is the next step for the Crystal Tower raid-line
• The Golden Saucer finally makes its appearance.
• Patch is very large so it's being split in to two parts.
• DX11 being shown off, still likely won't be implemented until Heavensward.
• Triple Triad minigames (Golden Saucer?)
• Chocobo racing (Golden Saucer?)
• Reworking of how gear drops work for the World of Darkness
• Wanderer's Palace Hard and Amdapor Keep Hard remixes. Tonberries and Demon Wall return.
• A new step for the Zodiac weapon questline.
• It will be the last main regular patch before the big transition into heavensward
• The story will continue towards Agrius and Midgardsormr and the new story dungeon related to them is called "Keeper of the Lake", will take place inside Agrius, a downed battleship from 1.0.

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So how will drops work in Crystal Tower now? I saw something saying gear drops as well as weapon upgrades? Have they specified this? Thanks for the info as always.

@kishinfoulux said:

My understanding is that they're separating the upgrade items and the actual gear, but take that with a grain of salt until it's actually confirmed.

From the Live letter Q&A Thread on their forums:

Q3: Will the rewards for the new chapter of Crystal Tower include the materials needed to enhance Ironworks equipment?

A3: We’ll introduce the upgrade items as loot, but they will be separate from the weekly reward since players were having trouble deciding which piece of loot that they wanted last time.

Q4: Will there be any weapon rewards for the new Crystal Tower content? Can you show us the graphics for the equipment?

A4: The rewards will be armor as usual, but there will be new crafting materials that will allow you to craft new weapons.

Looks like YoshiP has announced the release date for the first part of this patch as January 20th.

Official trailer went up this morning. 2.5 Is coming out next Tuesday. The 2nd half of the patch will be in March.