Guild Wars 2

Is there a technical reason why we we players are not given an option to apply dyes to our weapons? I have some neat skins that would look cool in different colours…

on some weapons i imagine it wouldn’t be a problem like those normal crafted swords for example.

They are exactly the same skin,but slightly different metal/wood color.

but on skins with animations, glow, and effects its a whole new thing.

But who knows!, maybe the new legendary armor will come with a inherent glow /effect that we can dye, and perhaps then we can dye the glowy/shiny weapons as well…

This reminds me also about that gem shop lunatic halloween outfit. changing its dye will change the flame colors

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/

Scroll down to the second big block of text for a dev reply on the technical reasons why not.

The technical reason is because it wasn’t put in game way back then and they’re unlikely now to go back and redo all the hundreds of weapons to put in dye channels and redo the hero panel to have dye options on it for weapons.

Just a flesh wound has the tl;dr version. For those interested in a more involved answer, here are snippets from jpetrie’s response to a similar question 9 months ago.

The full text (also referenced above) remains at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/cqjqrbj

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)… what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that

1. The decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one …made pretty early.
2. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
3. This [requires] some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
4. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
5. [I]t was decided that we wouldn’t bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
6. 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.

(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.)

(I added the numbered bullets to make it easier to see the thinking leading up to the situation in which we find ourselves today.)

My paraphrase: ANet decided that weapon colors didn’t stand out enough to make it worth creating the code infrastructure to support weapon dye channels. All future weapon designs depend on them not having dye channels. It’s possible to change this, but it would require creating the new mechanic and then (in effect) fixing every single weapon in the game. (Less than a complete redesign, more than just a simple copy/paste.)

So even just adding dye channels to future weapon sets would be a huge undertaking, i.e. they’d still have to build the infrastructure and still have to make adjustments in existing skins (even if they didn’t get a user-dyeable channel).

reason i want weapon dye is…super weapon skins

I volunteer for texture work!