Please make all or most backpacks able to be dyed

If there is already a post about this, I have not seen it....Most of us truly enjoy being able to make our character as individual as possible. I would love to be able to have multiple channels to dye on all my backpack items, especially the living one such as the Sloth or the Griffin Hatchling, etc. Being able to match my backpack to my armor would be awesome.

It's not possible, at this time. I'm sure one of the forum regulars will post the Dev quote about why.

Good luck.

Not able to quote a dev. Something that can be dyed needs a channel for it. This game is very good at immersion, but reality is that it is designed. An item with a fixed color is very different then an item with a dye channel. It is different at the base of the design, making such a change now would mean going back and re-doing every backpack from start, but it will always be redesigned and not the same. Even asking to make all backpacks that way from now on, means it will take a lot more time to release a new skin,

From Tidgepot.3285, regarding someone asking why the Shining Blade Glider can be dyed, but not the backpack, even though each were created relatively recently.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6257985

It’s extremely hard to alter the engine so backpacks are dyeable. As far as the engine is considered, backpacks are considered items (like weapons) and gliders are considered effects. The engine needs to be fundamentally altered from the ground up to allow for item dye channels. It’s not impossible, but not easy. To add to this, the Shining Blade glider was designed on its own and after it was modeled one of the artists saw that it could be turned into a backpack for the players to enjoy. I think lazy is an inappropriate term for this situation when someone went the extra mile. However, I do understand your frustration with not knowing it couldn’t be dyed. That should be more clear.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6260425

If you need citation, then look no further. I’m the dev who concepted this glider! Granted, I’m an artist so I couldn’t give you the full technical rundown like Josh Petrie, but I do handle our engine daily.

Whether or not the equipment takes damage or not has no bearing on how the engine separates items. The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects. Now I’m not positive on this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if we decided to make gliders as items, we’d have to retroactively alter the system in a way that would allow for weapons/backpieces to be dyed.

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I’d like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we’d also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s SO much more to the process that I don’t have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we’re fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

Here's a former dev explaining why we can't dye weapons and aren't likely to every be able to

...the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early.

• We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
• This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
• That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
• and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn't bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
• Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But

it would be a nontrivial undertaking

(and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to

re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(text is verbatim; emphasis and bullet points are mine)

tl;dr It's only "possible" in a theoretical sense

• They decided long before launch that there wasn't enough bang for the buck (effort|time) to dye weapons.
• The existing game depends on that decision, so changing it would mean re-rendering every single weapon in the game (whether dyeable or not), plus additional QA to make sure weapons work properly with extra 'metadata'.

For what it's worth, a few of the past requests from the old forums

• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-Dye/4662447
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-dyes/3344528
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-able-Weapons/5768082
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Let-us-dye-weapons/4547784
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapon-dye-Application/4818242
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapons-back-Dye/5090753
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dyes-for-weapons/5836961
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Dye-Channels-on-Legendaries/6521161

@"Trelle.8162" said:If there is already a post about this, I have not seen it....

You might not be aware that these forums have a decent search function. For example, when I typed in "backpack dye", I saw 3-4 posts (including yours) that asked about dyeing backpacks. (A few were about what dyes people could use on armor to match the packs.)

I think it's fine to see this same question posted every month or two, because many of us have questioned why we can dye armor but not weapons, why we can dye gliders but not nearly-identical back items. And each month, there are new (or returning) players who haven't had a chance to see any of the previous threads or responses. I mention the search feature because many folks (including some forum veterans) aren't aware of it.