In this article of the Scrying Pool, I look at the possibility of dyeing weapons in Guild Wars 2.

In each article of The Scrying Pool, I look at what is and what could be. After taking a look at what is present in Guild Wars 2 now, be that lore or game mechanics, I then ask What If? What if this happened in the lore or this feature was added in a future patch.

Guild Wars 2 has a pretty awesome dye system. Players do not constantly need to buy or farm consumable dye packs whenever they are interested in changing their armor's color. Instead, players may use any color to dye their armor as many times as they want once it has been unlocked on a character.

While there is this awesome dye system, it is limited to just armor. With over 400 different colors available, you can make a truly unique look. Weapons on the other hand are static. You see one and you see them all.

For those color coordinators out there, this then extends into limiting the dye system as it applies to armor. Since players cannot change the colors of weapons, it falls onto the armor to match the weapon. There is that age old fashion rule that a man's belt must match his swords and the lack of weapon color options limits the selection of available belts.

Veterans of GW1 will point out that weapons in the original Guild Wars could be dyed in the same way as armor. While this worked in GW1, I don't think that it would work well in GW2.

Something to consider is all of the unique weapons in that game that were made to look a specific way. This includes weapons skins such as the Legendary weapons, but also skins such as the recently released Super Adventure Box (SAB) skin variations. 

The SAB weapons come in different variations depending on where they were obtained. The normal mode weapons are blue while the Tribulation (hard-mode) versions come in different colors depending on which world was completed. The World 1 Tribulation set looks exactly the same as the normal mode skins, but are recolored to be green instead of blue. Likewise World 2 comes in Yellow and when Worlds 3 and 4 are released there will be Red and Purple variants of the same weapons.

With a system like this, you can't just open weapons up to be dyed otherwise you lose the specialness of these different weapons. If you could get a blue SAB weapon and dye it yellow, the yellow weapons that are earned through completing Tribulation World 2 become worthless.

The SAB weapons do show one way that players can find customization in weapons. Instead of opening weapons up to dyes, ArenaNet could recolor weapons and release them as completely different items.

This solution, however, presents its own problems. Opening up the trading post, you can find many different pieces of gear that all look the same but are different items due to their level, rarity and stat combinations. If these weapon variations are obtained in the same way as the current weapons, they would most likely come in the same amount of level, rarity and stat combinations and double the number of weapons listed on the trading post.

Even if this situation is bypassed, with each skin limited to a single stat combination, it still brings back some of the problems with the transmutation system that I brought up in The Scrying Pool: Transmutation Woes. While there might be 10 different color variations of the Dhuumseal, I am limited to picking just one to use. If you want to be able to switch colors, you are forced to get a new Dhuumseal of the correct color to transmute every time or you need to hold onto multiples of the same weapon.

What I would like to see is a template swap added to weapons. With this players would switch to dye mode just like they would for dyeing armor, but instead of applying colors to dye channels on the gear, the weapons would already have predefined options built in. Players could then click one of these options to swap colors on a weapon to that full template.

With this system the complaints that dyes would cause crazy looking weapons would be bypassed. Also because ArenaNet would be creating each of these templates itself it can preserve the flavor that each weapon creates. Legendary weapons that I would not even consider opening up dye channels for, now have the possibility of a couple of color variations.

If there are predefined templates for weapons, however, then wouldn't that mean that the dye system is still excluded from weapons?

If possible, I would want to set up these templates so they are by default locked. You pick up the Dhuumseal and its default look is all you would have available on a character that has not unlocked any dyes. Each template then would be tied to a single dye color, presumably the major color used for that template. Players would then need to unlock that dye to unlock that dye template.

Then this unlock system could be expanded. Instead of having one of each color SAB sword, the variations could be each color. Instead of the unlocks for those being tied to dyes, it would be unlocked upon completing a new variant. After making my yellow sword, I would unlock the ability to turn my blue sword into a yellow sword then back to blue just by selecting the appropriate template variant. The green variant however, would still be locked since I haven't crafted a green sword as of yet.

Setting it up this way would require a lot of work for ArenaNet, but setting up the dye channels for weapons would also require a lot of work and would be almost the same amount of work to just implement new items as weapon variants.

Then, though probably not the most popular method, special Legendary templates could be sold through the gemstore. Would you pay gems if, instead of shooting Unicorns out of the Dreamer, you could shoot cute Quaggans at your enemies?

Matt "Mattsta" Adams got an ascended weapon box to drop! It was in a champion bag, but it had condition stats so I just made a staff for my mesmer. First time since the beam skill update that I've used a staff on it.

My guild was talking about ascended armor the other day, how it is supposed to come out by the end of the year and that there are only a couple more months left. I said that maybe we will get ascended armor with the Wintersday patch and the armor will make us look like snowmen! They didn't share my enthusiasm for snowman armor.

As always, if you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.