«Ackadia's Guide to Guild Wars… Dyes for weapons and armour »

Introduction to Dyes in Guild Wars

What are they for?
They change the colours of your armour and weapons. They is an eventh colour available from merchants, this just restores your clothes to their original settings.
(Used to be called dye remover and could be used to lighten colours when mixed)


How does this work?
It is an addition process and you can mix up to four colours. . Originally you had to mix the dyes together, then apply them and hope you liked the result. Fortunately some bright person came up with a dye preview window and now you can try any combination of up to four colours and even rotate your character to see the effect - before commiting the changes. Originally adding colours of the same shade could make the effect brighter, but this isn't possible now. See the screen grab below.

I've noticed the dyes can be very expensive. Why is this?
It's down to rarity, plus supply and demand. The dye (and material) vendors in 'post searing' Tyria can only sell what players sell to them. Then them's the 'drop rate'. This is only a rule of thumb guide and based on researching the 'pre-searing' interlude or trading introduction to the game.

Basically I killed every hostile creature on an area by area basis and logged the results. It goes roughly like this:

• For every 150 hostile creature's item drop you might get one coloured dye (red, blue, green etc)
  
  
• For every 10 regular colours you might get one silver (less than 1 in 1,500 chance)
  
  
• For every 10 silver dyes you might get one black or white (less than 1 in 15,000 chance)
  
  

I could be scientific and spend months just 'farming dyes' to get a precise figure but it's the work of seconds for NCSoft to alter the drop rates and apply it to the next update. You may hear of people seeing two dyes one after the other but - especially where black is concerned - you are talking lottery number chances.

Here's a useful link: GameWiki on dye drop rates

What are dyes worth, I see them requested a lot ?
As a rough guide, for those those haven't visited dye vendor yet:

• Purple, orange and yellow cost around 100g
  These vendors will only offer you 10g or so
  
  
• Green, red and blue, being more popular, are around 175g each
  Vendors will offer in the region of 60 to 80g
  
  
• Silver, being both rare and popular, costs in the region of 750g
  These can be sold to the NPC traders for around 600g
  
• Black and White, the rarest, costs in the region of 8,000g, rising to up to over 12k in times of demand, White being the more expensive or the two.
  Ever popular, these are worth over 6,000g if sold to the stalls
  As an aside, the white dye sold for a staggering 32k when it first came out in October 2006
  

Typically prices with vary by 25% from day to day and (scammers aside*) there's a large number of people making money in the game just by trading these, especially given that black can vary between 6,000g and 10,000g over the course of a week. Naturally, if you spend the time, you can buy or sell for a better deal from other players.


Black/White dye con artists
In 'pre-searing' especially you will frequently see WTB Black dye or similar. If you pull them up there will claim there are really offering 5,000g. Naturally we all know they are lying, otherwise they would announce the offer price. As mentioned earlier, a black vial of dye costs as much as 10,000g (with highs of over 14k) in 'post searing' Tyria and Cantha, meaning the vendors will typically pay between 6,000g and 8,000g. These con artists - for that is all they are - typically offer new players 200g and laugh at how gullible these 'noobs' are.

Here's one quotes from the delightful Miss Kewl:
y r u saying the price if u say the real price u dont find somone stupid enough to buy it

Yes, according to Miss Kewl and several others like her, if you are new to the game and can't possibly know the value of every item in the game before you have played it, YOU are stupid. You deserve to be be tricked out of a valuable item. In my opinion it says far, far more about the type of person the scammer is than their victim…

Why doesn't this colour doesn't look right on my …
Two contributing factors, the initial colour and the material. Just the same as painting walls or dying clothes at home. It is easier to turn a white robe black than bleach a black one white. You get the same efforts applied to the material, whether it is bone, leather, cloth or steel.

Related links

• OGaming's Dye charts
  
  
• Guild Wars Guru's dye charts
  
  
• GameWiki Dye combinations
  
  
• Original version of this guide (before dye updates)