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[Suggestion] Dye Channels on Legendaries

So, legendaries… they’re wonderful! I can tell that they were carefully planned with their design and color scheme so that they all have a unique feel. But, I can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to be able to dye my Nevermore’s blue ghostly effects to any color of my choosing. It would be such a great way to have multiple color schemes and make it feel like a whole other weapon on different classes (i.e. green effects on a Necro, purple effects on a Mesmer.)

I realize dye channels on all of the legendaries wouldn’t exactly make much sense or completely change the theme of them, like Frostfang or Bifrost. And then you have Sunrise/Twilight that I assume wouldn’t even be possible to dye. Nevertheless, I believe it would be neat to see different color combinations people come up with for their legendaries. Not to mention I think it could be a nice added perk for all the blood, sweat, and tears put into making them!

[Suggestion] Dye Channels on Legendaries

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Posted by: Tanner Blackfeather.6509

Tanner Blackfeather.6509

The items themselves can’t be made dyeable without a rework of the entire item system, that’s been stated practically since launch as I understand it.

The other stuff (particle effects, auras etc) might be possible, would be cool!

[Suggestion] Dye Channels on Legendaries

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

While there are technical limitations that won’t allow us to dye legendary weapons unless the ability to dye weapons is implemented for all weapons, I do think a decent-ish workaround would be for ANet to offer various skins for each legendary where it makes sense, and each skin would just have a different color palette. I can’t imagine it would be that much work, since the models and animations are already created, all the artists would have to do is fine a new color palette that would look good.

Biggest drawbacks are it would still be incredibly limited compared to the traditional dye system. But even if we got say 3 different skins for legendaries where it made sense, that would still allow for some customization. I imagine that one would swap skins by a similar method as to how you swap stats right now.

[Suggestion] Dye Channels on Legendaries

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Posted by: Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

Here’s the (former) developer source for Tanner’s claim that neither weapons nor backpacks can be made dyeable without a total system rework:

…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’.

And, for what it’s worth, just a few of the past requests about dying weapons.

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