Stone of Recall

A Stone of Recall is a spell that opens a portal to the closest Horadrim magical gateway. This spell (formerly known as Town Portal) was learnable in Diablo I, but could only be cast from scrolls in Diablo II.

Town Portals were present in early Diablo III development. They were removed in 2010 as the developers found them exploitative, in that they allowed players to too easily escape danger in battle. Town Portals remained out of the game for over a year, until they returned during development in 2011, as revealed in a Bashiok forum post in June 2011. [1]

Though they are back in the game, there are limitations on TPs, to prevent players from using them as escape portals during combat. They have also gained a new name, Stone of Recall.

Contents

Diablo 3 Town Portals

Wizard casting Stone of Recall.

Town Portals returned to the game during development in 2011, as revealed by Bashiok in a forum post. [2]

We’ve always been trying to see if we can create a better system than town portals, making waypoints the main travel back to town mechanic. But, it’s looking like it’s just simply more fun and a quality-of-life-nicety to be able to jump back to town from anywhere even if waypoints are all over the place. Plus it’s not really that hard to avoid the few pitfalls that TPs in Diablo II had.

There are, however, limitations to the new Stone of Recall. It is now a spell which must be channeled for ten seconds, an exact duplicate of the "hearthstone" system from World of WarCraft. In the image to the left, the Wizard is channeling the spell, meaning that the little red bar above her is draining. Once the bar is drained, the spell is complete. Any damage taken while channeling will cancel the cast.

The Stone of Recall is not a drop. It is a permanent part of the UI once attained through a quest, similar to the Nephalem Cube.

Why They Were Removed

For a long time during Diablo III's development, there were no player-castable town portals. The D3 Team felt they were an exploitative game mechanism that made it too easy to escape from danger. Jay Wilson explained their reasoning in a 2010 interview with Gamespot. [3]

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.

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. The Stone of Recall is likely to not make a portal at all, and simply move the character back to town.

Travel Alternatives

While Town Portals were out of the game, the D3 Team stressed that the more frequent waypoints would prove an adequate substitution. Though TPs are back, in some limited form, there's no indication that waypoints are going to be any less common.

Besides Waypoints allowing players to travel to and from town (or to other waypoints all throughout the game) there are ways for players to sell items directly from the dungeons (via some NPCs, or by other unspecified methods). There is also a way for players to travel instantly one-way from town to join up with others in the dungeon.

Jay Wilson commented on this during an interview at Gamescom 2010: [4]

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