Town Portal

A Town Portal is a spell that opens a portal to the closest Horadrim magical gateway. This spell was learnable in Diablo I, but could only be cast from scrolls in Diablo II.

Town Portals are not found Diablo III.

Diablo 3 Town Portals

There are no player-castable town portals in Diablo III. The D3 Team felt they were an exploitative game mechanism that made it too easy to escape from danger.

Town Portals are gone. We found them to be a crippling combat exploit. We found that while they had some cooperative uses, they tended to split players up a lot. As soon as players wanted to go back to town they did, and then they had to figure out how to get back to their party. We don’t want players to ever be split up.

But the big thing is that Town Portals were a combat exploit. When players can essentially portal out of any situation, it makes it almost impossible for the designers to create a game that’s challenging and compelling, or a world that you’re really immersed in. To replace the need for town portals we’ve added salvaging and we have a couple of other systems that we haven’t shown yet that help with that. The goal is for you to not really miss them.

Blue Portals?

A portal for Cain.

Though there are no player-cast Town Portals, there may still be portals for transportation. There were numerous red portals in Diablo II, to take players between distant locations that weren't appropriate for Waypoint travel. There were also town portals cast by NPCs that players could not use, such as those the rescued Barbarian NPCs cast in Act Five.

These types of portals may return in Diablo III. One was shown in the first gameplay movie, from June 2008. In it a Barbarian rescues Deckard Cain from the dungeon, and sends him back to safety through a portal. Likely there were still player-usable Town Portals in the game, at that early point in the development. How this sort of quest-related NPC travel will be handled, now that TPs are gone, is unknown.

Travel Alternatives

Since there are no more town portals for players to use, the D3 Team has added some other options for speedy returns to town.

There are more Waypoints than there were in Diablo II. There are also various conveniences to make it less necessary to return to town. These include the Scroll of Wealth, the salvage cube and various conveniences from the merchant NPCs in the Caravan.

Jay Wilson commented on this during an interview at Gamescom 2010:

Gamona.de: There are no town portals in Diablo 3. What’s the alternative for easy travel?

Jay Wilson: We’ve put in several things to offset the lack of Town Portals. The most obvious are more frequent Waypoints. These give players more opportunities to return to go back to town. We’ve also added salvaging to let players break items down into small parts that stack up in your inventory. We’ve also added a Scroll of Wealth that allows you to sell items right on location.

Spell Lore

The Town Portal spell seems to be closely related to the Horadric Waypoint network, and work with similar magical components to the Teleport spell, however, it does not seem to require the same type of physical component as the runed stone of a Waypoint. The Brotherhood constructed numerous magical gateways between their mighty fortresses and settlements so that they could quickly concentrate their defences against any incursion by the Demons. With but a thought, the Crusaders of the Light could transport themselves to predetermined destinations many leagues apart.

It's likely that there are Waypoints with additional magic infused into them to allow the use of a Town Portal spell to the vicinity of that Waypoint. A Waypoint located at a former Horadrim fortress or settlement site could be what enables Town Portal spells to bring you there. If this is the case, it might be possible for a Sorcerer with enough skill to use a similar spell to teleport directly to a Waypoint.

It could also be a completely different set of teleportation nodes, besides the actual Waypoint network, made specifically for retreating back to the nearest safe place, and nothing else.

Although the secret of creating these gateways as well as the Waypoints has been long lost, it is still possible to use the pathways that are already in place. A Portal opened by means of this spell will always take the caster to the location of the nearest gate and remain open long enough to bring the caster back to his point of origin. The Tristram Cathedral is built upon the remains of a Horadrim monastery, and has at least in the past harboured a portal gateway nearby.

References

• Diablo I Manual
• Diablo II Manual