Dye Channels for Weapons, Back Items, and Skills

[Coeruleum.9164]

Could we have dye channels for weapons, back items, and skills please? I think every part of everything should be dyable. If people start commonly doing ugly things like dying every part of all their armor, weapons, and skills Permafrost then we can limit the dyes to a few color choices like it already is on some mounts. I just would really like to coordinate the colors on my characters more. I would like some Seven Reapers weapons with blue instead of green, but I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who would rather have red, purple, orange, or white instead of green, and I don't think this game will ever make enough recolors of everything to satisfy everyone, so just adding at least a few dye options on existing things seems like a better option. The popularity of male mesmers would probably also skyrocket if you could change the colors on your skills.

If this does get implemented I think all the people who have weapons and back items that are literally just recolors of other weapons could be compensated in gold. I don't know anyone in this game who's like "oh, I definitely have enough gold" and the advantages of being able to dye your fancy expensive weapons with your fancy expensive dyes would way outweigh having a few recolors of weapons that don't seem to be that popular anyways like the antique weapon sets for rich people too. Basically, I see being able to dye everything as just a win-win.

Thank you for your consideration!

[Smoosh.2718]

Im still struggling to grasp why people want dyable weapons, back items i get. but weapons... (tbh if you can dye something on the weapon it must be a very small part of it) and not the whole thing... seriously imagine the horrible things people would make with it.

That being said the only thing I agree with is dyeable back items and thats it. Why not skills/weapons? You'd ruin legendary weapons even more than the current BLTC weapon skins already have. Skills should ONLY be changed by a legendary weapon. Want a new skill effect / colour, go and make one for it (yes some skills dont get changed mind you... looking at you offhand focus for ele)

The current system encourages you to get weapons that work with your armour, if you could dye a weapon, you'd end up losing motivation to get the other skins since you can dye your weapon to your armour.

We need items in the game that are as they are (weapons being the big one).

[Coeruleum.9164]

@Smoosh.2718 said:Im still struggling to grasp why people want dyable weapons, back items i get. but weapons... (tbh if you can dye something on the weapon it must be a very small part of it) and not the whole thing... seriously imagine the horrible things people would make with it.

That being said the only thing I agree with is dyeable back items and thats it. Why not skills/weapons? You'd ruin legendary weapons even more than the current BLTC weapon skins already have. Skills should ONLY be changed by a legendary weapon. Want a new skill effect / colour, go and make one for it (yes some skills dont get changed mind you... looking at you offhand focus for ele)

The current system encourages you to get weapons that work with your armour, if you could dye a weapon, you'd end up losing motivation to get the other skins since you can dye your weapon to your armour.

We need items in the game that are as they are (weapons being the big one).

The current system doesn't encourage you to get weapons that work with your armor, it encourages you to get armor that works with your weapons because you can dye most of your armor whatever color you want but if you want something specific like black and blue you're really limited as to what weapons you can get. Some armor and weapon shapes really don't work together and I think some weapons in the same set don't even work together on some characters. I see lots of people where they have a bunch of different colors of weapons because not all the weapons in a single set would go with their armor. For example, maybe a weapon set has colors they like and they use the axe because they're a big strong berserker but they use the sword from a different set because the sword in the set their axe is from is a rapier and a rapier would look silly on a big strong berserker.

[jokke.6239]

@Smoosh.2718 said:Im still struggling to grasp why people want dyable weapons, back items i get. but weapons... (tbh if you can dye something on the weapon it must be a very small part of it) and not the whole thing... seriously imagine the horrible things people would make with it.

That being said the only thing I agree with is dyeable back items and thats it. Why not skills/weapons? You'd ruin legendary weapons even more than the current BLTC weapon skins already have. Skills should ONLY be changed by a legendary weapon. Want a new skill effect / colour, go and make one for it (yes some skills dont get changed mind you... looking at you offhand focus for ele)

The current system encourages you to get weapons that work with your armour, if you could dye a weapon, you'd end up losing motivation to get the other skins since you can dye your weapon to your armour.

We need items in the game that are as they are (weapons being the big one).

So getting a weapon just because of a color is better than having more options, because maybe someone would lose motivation to get a certain skin, because they now have something they like better?I would say having more options is always better.People who like to finish collections always have motivation to get the skins they are missing.Also .. I would argue that having dyeable weapons would actually open up much MORE motivation to get certain skins.

But I don't think it's likely on many weapons to get dye channels, it would require tons of work.But for future weapons and backs (they have already started on this for backs) it would be amazing!

[kharmin.7683]

Older back items are not going to have dye channels added to them. The devs have already stated this. The forums search function will help you to find the existing threads on that topic.

For me, dyeable weapons don't make a lot of sense as I'm usually zoomed far enough out that I wouldn't really see it. Perhaps on the larger, bulky, anime type greatswords or hammers? I guess. I certainly wouldn't want this to be a priority, though.

[Taril.8619]

It is very unlikely that weapons, back items and skills will become dyable.

For weapons and back items, they would need to be re-created from scratch with the dye channels in place. Which is a lot of work and they've already stated they won't go back to add dye channels to the small pool of existing back items that lack dye channels.

Future back items are coming with dye channels, but from what I can tell there seems to be no indication of them putting out new weapons with dye channels (Instead, they keep putting out new weapons that come in a number of colours that you have to obtain individually)

Dyable skills would probably be a similar fare, only now it's going against the constant complaints about fights being hard to see because every character is hosting their very own disco light show. In addition, there's also the aspect of visual clarity to allow people to know what abilities are being used (Though, it would be possible to add settings to disable dyed skills from other players, it would again come back to the additional workload to do so)

[Omega.6801]

Would be nice, will not happen.

[flog.3485]

@Taril.8619 said:It is very unlikely that weapons, back items and skills will become dyable.

For weapons and back items, they would need to be re-created from scratch with the dye channels in place. Which is a lot of work and they've already stated they won't go back to add dye channels to the small pool of existing back items that lack dye channels.

Future back items are coming with dye channels, but from what I can tell there seems to be no indication of them putting out new weapons with dye channels (Instead, they keep putting out new weapons that come in a number of colours that you have to obtain individually)

Dyable skills would probably be a similar fare, only now it's going against the constant complaints about fights being hard to see because every character is hosting their very own disco light show. In addition, there's also the aspect of visual clarity to allow people to know what abilities are being used (Though, it would be possible to add settings to disable dyed skills from other players, it would again come back to the additional workload to do so)

Why do you think it would need to be re-created from scratch ? Dying weapons could be a new endgame goal reward (for exotics/ascended weapons) and all the devs would to do, is to add a new system upgrade (with the mystic forge for example) marketed through the next expansion.I mean, I am no programmer of course, but if my assumption oh how things function is wrong, please tell me.

[Randulf.7614]

Dyeing weapons apparently requires an enormous amount of work and a “non trivial” patch.

This was one of those things they have said had to be designed from the start. There are a few old dev quotes explaining why it almost certainly will never be done

There’s basically no short, simple or easy way to program the dyeing of weapons.

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

@Taril.8619 said:

...they've already stated they won't go back to add dye channels to the LARGE pool of existing back items that lack dye channels.

Fixed that for you.

[Coeruleum.9164]

@flog.3485 said:

@Taril.8619 said:It is very unlikely that weapons, back items and skills will become dyable.

For weapons and back items, they would need to be re-created from scratch with the dye channels in place. Which is a lot of work and they've already stated they won't go back to add dye channels to the small pool of existing back items that lack dye channels.

Future back items are coming with dye channels, but from what I can tell there seems to be no indication of them putting out new weapons with dye channels (Instead, they keep putting out new weapons that come in a number of colours that you have to obtain individually)

Dyable skills would probably be a similar fare, only now it's going against the constant complaints about fights being hard to see because every character is hosting their very own disco light show. In addition, there's also the aspect of visual clarity to allow people to know what abilities are being used (Though, it would be possible to add settings to disable dyed skills from other players, it would again come back to the additional workload to do so)

Why do you think it would need to be re-created from scratch ? Dying weapons could be a new endgame goal reward (for exotics/ascended weapons) and all the devs would to do, is to add a new system upgrade (with the mystic forge for example) marketed through the next expansion.I mean, I am no programmer of course, but if my assumption oh how things function is wrong, please tell me.

I used to create games on ROBLOX and I can't see how it would possibly take that much effort to make all the weapons and back items dyable. I can see how they'd have to reupload them with channels but that wouldn't involve making any new models, textures, or effects for weapons. Changing the weapon and back item code to resemble the armor code would be a literal copy-and-paste that even I could do. Going through and breaking the textures and glows on weapons and back items into dye channels and re-uploading them would probably take a week or two max, especially once they remove the ones that are literally recolors. There are already armor pieces that lack dye channels where I think they should have them, like the orange glow on all the Citadel of Flame armor pieces that can't be changed to any other color, although having a few armor pieces like that still allows a lot of customization compared to the fact you can't re-dye your weapons at all so if you can't find something in a style you like and the colors you like you just have to decide which is more important.

[Sigmoid.7082]

Its always interesting to see comments from people who have never worked specifically on GW2 how easy something would be and how it should be achievable in a very short time span... Anyways in case people are looking for a short summary give this very old quote a read.

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

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

[Vavume.8065]

@Smoosh.2718 said:seriously imagine the horrible things people would make with it.

People already make horrible looking characters, it would make no difference.

[Coeruleum.9164]

@Vavume.8065 said:

@Smoosh.2718 said:seriously imagine the horrible things people would make with it.

People already make horrible looking characters, it would make no difference.

Yes, people make characters that are as bad of an eyesore as possible even without being able to dye weapons and back items. If people could just dye anything in the game including those Citadel of Flame armor pieces and other things you can't dye, it wouldn't make characters look better or worse, just add more variety.