The Book of Regression, an item you get by vendoring an Orb of Scouring with 1x Scroll of Wisdom, apparently downlevels your character by 1 and resets all exp to 0.
What I want to understand is, for what reason would this be used for? The only obvious answer that comes to my mind is that certain PvP characters would want to be at a specific level threshold, and this would allow them to get to that threshold, but other than that I can't think of any realistic use for this.
Is there some intended use for this item?
2 Answers
1. Self-imposed challenge.
Do you want to kill Uber-elder on lvl 1 character? With some Books of Regression you can try.
2. Farm in low-level locations.
Some divination cards can drop in low level locations, but Drop Rate penalty may prevent effective farm. Books of Regression allow to keep character on specific level to avoid this penalty.
3. Leaderboards
Some players want to compete for a place on Labyrinth Leaderboards, some of them have level limits - 40 for Normal and 60 for Cruel.
3In addition to the excellent suggestions by @arghtype @VanBuzzKill (lab is the reason for the season on the book) there is a very similar potential XP penalty for a given area relative to your character level.
See Experience penalties in PoE wiki.
If your level is too low or high for an area you do not gain the same rate of XP. This changes a bit at level 95 where the grind gets grind-y-er.
who would be interested?
- Racers optimizing their progression to be very min-maxed (they try to barely skate through some of those Act1-4 zones where the leveling gear is throwaway SSF anyway)
- if you find yourself hitting a wall and progression is stale something needs a second look this could be a small part
