Guild Wars 2

Wouldnt it be cool if we could hide weapons like the shield so our backpiece would be visible? I never played gw1 but I’ve heard you could color weapons, wonder why we cant do that in gw2?

Ill try and find the dev response about dyeing weapons. It is a massive job to go back and add dye channels, which would generate a large patch and potentially some serious bugs. It was likely not chosen at launch to cut down workload.

Randulf.7614:

Ill try and find the dev response about dyeing weapons. It is a massive job to go back and add dye channels, which would generate a large patch and potentially some serious bugs. It was likely not chosen at launch to cut down workload.

I would say too that they had legendaries in mind and with all their special effects dying those would just not be possible. I expect anet expected most people to get them in time so the dying of weapons really would not have been such a big demand. Yet we see this topic come up now and again.

Past requests:

• 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

And response from a former dev

…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.

(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’.

Thanks for the links. I couldn’t find the dev response, but I didn’t really look over at Reddit.

Randulf.7614:

Thanks for the links. I couldn’t find the dev response, but I didn’t really look over at Reddit.

NP. They have posted about it more than once, including during interviews (published on fanzine sites), during AMAs as well as not, and even in these forums. I saved that particular link because it offered one of the simpler explanations.