Yeah Act 2 and 3 just kind of suck from that regard. You always port into the same “starting area” if you leave the game in those acts.
In the legacy game it was common to use Warriv to port back to Act 1, then take the Act 1 WP to where ever you wanted to go, if you ported into Act 2. D2R’s loading screens between acts are longer, so depending on your system and character build, it’s sort of a toss up if that’s actually still faster.
Similarly if you were farming in act 3, it was common to make sure you ported to Act 4 before you left the game, so you’d start in the center by the WP, rather than having to walk all the way from Meshif to the center of Act 3. If you kill Mephy last, it is very easy to simply take the red portal to Act 4. For my Trav barb I think I’ve timed it before and it seemed faster to walk from Act 3 start, but that was before I realized setting the game to higher fps seems to make the load times shorter, and you can also repair the install to optimize the load times as well.
Act 5 in the legacy game had Cain moved to the stash/wp area, but only for online, and only after a few patches, so when they made D2R they seemingly used the offline maps for his location, and never fixed it.