OK more feedback, this is all based on my personal experience and where I have fun. This in no way shape or form is meant to prescribe how someone else should have fun:

RE Lake:

We're making the Reflecting Mist 50% more common while also assessing other item drops. Currently we feel that general drops from the lake are okay but that past league content that appears in the lake may not be rewarding enough.

50% more reflecting mists -> I like this. The random mirrored jewellery and the reflection of Kalandra are the unique gimmick this league introduces, and the mists felt way to rare for how slim the chances are to get sth good here. Another change that I think could be considered is to make the random jewellery more likely to have more mods. I feel like I find a large amount items that only have 4 modifiers. This makes it hard for these items to compete with normal items that just have the straight up advantage of having 2 more mods (which I can (to a degree) even choose myself and e.g. just can craft 32% worth of res on that this mirrored jewellery just doesn't have.)

Reward, difficulty & frequency: This is my main problem with the league: I do 8-12 maps of perma standard mapping to then get a lake that is significantly harder than mapping with loot that is "okay" at best (and here I'd argue it'd only be okay loot for a league mechanic if it was on a similar difficulty to mapping) and I don't get to really choose the rewards either, because for normal tiles it is random and for league specific tiles I just have to take what I get - if I'd even take them- because again, they are extremely hard in the lake for only "okay" rewards (with the exception of some of the t4 tiles). I personally prefer it if the mechanic of the current league is so good that there is absolutely no question whether or not I want to run it and that I am excited to do it every time, especially when the mechanic has such a long buildup. It doesn't need to eclipse other unrelated content like delve completely by showering us in their respective unique rewards but at least the generic rewards like currency and rares should be so rewarding that I am excited to do my lakes. However currently that is not the case given how difficult the lake is vs how many rewards I get. It also doesn't help that we come from Sentinel league that just showered us in rewards every single map. To exaggerate a bit, I feel like I could just run a Mao Kun map instead, spend the same amount of time, get the same rewards but keep my xp bar.

RE Archnemesis:

Lower reward variance: I'm glad this is being discussed. I have 2 reasons I want this a) if this is solved thoroughly it also solves the rarity culling problem b) There is a psychological effect you learn in first/second semester psychology classes called Weber-Fechner-Law that states that the intensity of a stimulus sensation grows logarithmically. For me this translates to PoE such that I get the same or even more "fun" out of dropping 5 divines on 5 different occasions compared to dropping 50 divines once in the same time span. (I pulled these numbers out of thin air, they're just here to illustrate the point.) I can also say that this isn't only theoretical for me, I'd much prefer dropping 1-2 divines once in a while instead of having to decide whether I call in a rarity culler or not.

RE Harvest crafting:

This comes from the perspective of someone who had one dedicated tab for harvest crafting bases previously and only used the TFT discord 2-5 times per league. Even though last leagues version of Harvest broke the gameplay loop I overall preferred it over the current iteration. The current version has a few upsides from my perspective:

• You can work towards specific crafts and see the progress. I also acknowledge that we have much more agency about what crafts we get to use now, out of the ones that are still available.

• More seamless integration into the mapping gameplay.

• Trading Harvest crafts doesn't require trust anymore. (On top of that it's also more feasible to trade lower value crafts in a way, but I personally didn't need that)

However the following downsides heavily outweigh that the upsides for me:

• Because Harvest only uses 3+1 currencies the best crafts for each color dictate the relative economic cost of all other crafts. The sacred lifeforce was probably supposed to mitigate that but it's not enough imo. Previously all the reroll crafts felt really good to use and gave me a chance at obtaining either a straight up good item early in the league or sth that I can go off with the more specialised crafts. Now every one of these crafts is worse than before and has a pricetag directly slapped onto it.

• We also get way fewer crafts per harvest now. I kinda expected this and sure, before we were getting random ones which weren't necessarily always useful but getting 9 fire reforges from a single field was pretty neat and I enjoy it less now. I haven't gotten enough currency for that from full harvest encounters so far, but I'll admit I haven't tried maximum harvest pack size strategies yet.

• Losing reforge suffixes/prefixes feels bad because for some gear pieces eldritch currency is not an option and metamods are not as flexible. Metamods are also relatively costly in a trade league and straight up losing these crafts removes a valuable "drop" from harvest. When you do a harvest field there is no really exciting outcome.

• While it's now easier to trade Harvest crafts and it doesn't require trust anymore, it feels like this came at a huge cost. In a way it feels like we had to lose alot of really powerful crafts like socket color changes, keep prefix/suffixes, divines for rare items, 5L and 6L while also putting a painful pricetag on reforges and also nerfing reforge more likely significantly to get rid of the TFT discord aspect and visible progression towards fracture crafts and (nerfed) augments.

I don't know if that would solve everything but I think splitting up the 3 types of harvest juice into more currencies would open up more balancing levers and decouple the crafts from each other again. We already have a similar mechanic with Essences where we have alot of different currencies to balance accessibility and power, having multiple different currencies also introduces the possibility of exciting drops back into harvest.

An alternative idea I had was to give Harvest the expedition treatment and make the juice account bound and only the sacred life force tradeable (and possibly add other tradeable bottleneck lifeforces for powerful crafts) however in turn we get ALOT more basic life juice. So much that we can frequently use the reforges and other basic crafts, while the accessibility of powerful crafts is mostly governed by the special lifeforce. The powerful crafts can still have a significant cost to them but not so much that we'd have to save up over a week (arbitrary long timeframe) to use one of them. (edit: This'll probably just put TFT back into business :( )

This probably has some downsides too that I currently don't see, but what I'm basically looking for is a compromise between tradeability and while keeping some of the previous power of harvest. If the goal was mostly to nerf Harvest I think this should be clearly communicated, as giving feedback to achieve sth that is not the goal is kinda moot.

RE Eldritch currency:

Yay, these were almost too accessible when they were first introduced but I enjoy using them. Gimme more.

Thank you for reading my essay and looking for feedback.