It’s been a long time since I’ve been frustrated enough to post one of these, but here we are. I originally planned to showcase a new caster glamour today since I have the Augmented Shire Philosopher’s Coat now, but I’ve hit a snag on it. As with many other body pieces, I really wanted to use Pure White here—a lot of the Shire gear is really classy and nearly perfect in white for Alahra, but in doing so, I’ve run into a very familiar old problem with the dye itself.

All dyes in FFXIV have a pair of secondary shades, one of them a darker shade of the base color, the other a lighter one. By far, the most common dyeing pattern uses the darker one, and for Pure White, this creates a silly problem. The darker color that is paired with Pure White Dye (and Snow White, too) isn’t an off-white: it’s much closer to the game’s Slate Grey Dye than any shade of white. This means that the grey often stands out in a really stark way next to the white on any items that follow this dyeing pattern.

With other dyes, the darker shade is definitely distinct, but since it’s still the same color, it doesn’t often stand out in the same way. I randomly tabbed through the dye window to get a few examples:

My guess is that the secondary shade is determined with some kind of automatic process that just moves the RGB scale toward black by a set amount from the base shade, as the results are generally quite consistent. across the range of available colors, and for most colors, that works okay. But for Pure White, that results in a shade that is pretty generally recognized as a completely separate color. On top of that, grey is often kind of a “drab” color, which just doesn’t fit very well alongside the very stark white that comes from the primary shade of white.

I’ve written about the problems with dyes in general before, of course, and also in a roundabout way when it comes to the Iga Ningi, which has the same problem that the coat does. The annoying thing is that the other secondary shade for Pure White would work better than the grey one in most cases. On items that go with the lighter accompanying color, Pure White is just more white. This pattern is comparatively rarer than the one that uses the darker color, but you can see it on items like the Gryphonskin Pantalettes or the Dhalmelskin Fringe Boots (which you can see an example of in one of my old healer glamours).

While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to have fine-tuned control over dyes (due to fundamentals of the item code and the various flags for color, glamour, and such), I do wonder if it would at the least have the option to cycle through the various default patterns for each color, so that in situations where Pure White gets paired with grey, we could toggle to the other pattern (or even the one that doesn’t have a secondary color to begin with).

The end result of all of this though is that I don’t have my caster glamour ready like I had hoped to. I’m going to play around with other colors over the weekend most likely, and figure out gloves and boots (and possibly another headpiece, I’d like to do something other than glasses) in accordance with whatever color I settle on.