Diablo 3 Town Portal and Waypoint FAQ
Need to know how travel works in Diablo 3? This guide to the town portal, waypoint, and flags works has everything you need to know!
Diablo 3 Town Portal
In Diablo 3, Town Portals work very differently in Diablo 3 than they did in Diablo 2. First of all, there are no more scrolls of Town Portal. Instead, you get a stone that lets you open portals to town once you defeat the Chancellor in Act 1.
Once you have the stone, you can open a portal at any point by pressing the “T” key. You cannot open a town portal until you get this item.
When you do get the stone of town portal, the portals work differently than they did in Diablo 2. When you open up a portal to town, only you can go through it and return through it. Other players instead travel through the banners or flags that sit in town.
Diablo 3 Banners
In Diablo 3, each player has a banner (flag) which sits in town. These are always active. When someone clicks on your flag in town, they are automatically transported to your character.
Additionally, since in Diablo 3 everyone is automatically in groups and you cannot “Declare Hostility” like you could in Diablo 2, there is no way to prevent this from happening in group games. Anyone can port to any player at any time. This is a good thing though as at higher difficulty levels you will not want to be playing in a group game as a solo player.
Furthermore, you do not get bonus XP/loot for fighting alone in a 4 person game – instead you get about the same amount as normal mode, so there is really no point in joining public games and sneaking off to do events when you could just as easily do them in your own game and get the same rewards.
Waypoints
Waypoints are found throughout the game and let you teleport to an area you have been before in the game. You have to unlock waypoints by walking up to them and earning the teleport.
However, Waypoints in Diablo 3 are not always unlocked once you unlock them. When I mean by this is that in Diablo 3, you can repeat quests that you have done before. When you are doing an old quest (say Reign of the Skeleton King), you do not get to use the Royal Crypts waypoint (which would put you right on top of the boss) even if you have found it in an earlier game. This exists to keep farming down to a reasonable level.
In Diablo 2, you could visit any waypoint that you had unlocked before. You can only use waypoints that do not advance you too far ahead of your current quest in Diablo 3. This is not as big of an inconvenience as it sounds, because in Diablo 3 Waypoints are much more common and they also do not seem to be hidden like in Diablo 2. You cannot really progress through the game without hitting waypoints.