Pastel colors, gold and silver dyes...

[Keydah]

The metallic colors are the most common, followed by black/white, and then the pastels.

Really?? I've gotten a butt-load of all four pastels, one each of the black and white, and one silver. (Sent out every hour I'm awake for the past three months) The retainers just don't want to give us colors we like, I guess...Pfft. I just need one pot of jet black, Keytah...come on.

[sarehptar]

My retainer is ilvl 96 or something like that and brings them back pretty much constantly. I get a least one set of dye a day, oftentimes more, so for ilvl 90 and above I would say they aren't that rare.

The gear grind is a bit annoying, but it shouldn't be a huge issue really--just go run through syrcus tower a few times, pick up all the gear that no one wants, and with the soldiery you get, buy some of the weathered accessories, tada done. Another thing is, at least as far as I have seen, it doesn't matter what gear your retainer is actually wearing for quick ventures, so long as it is above ilvl 90--so you don't have to intentionally grind out just gladiator gear. Anything that can be worn by all DoW would also work.

I feel like it's fine to restrict the dyes to higher level retainer rewards. If they were available through multiple means, they wouldn't really be considered rare or anything special.

[Aeyis]

Gear is kind of easy to obtain as long as you arent trying to gear multiple classes. Just equip whatever you can find in dungeons and buy more via soldiery.
It is much harder (time extensive) to gear up gathering retainers tho.

[SummonerSenah]

It's too bad you're not on my server or I'd offer my services. My retainer is i107 and brings me dye all the time. Right now on my retainer I have:
14 Metallic Gold
20 Metallic Silver
7 Pastel Purple
5 Pastel Blue
8 Pastel Green
8 Pastel Pink
11 Jet Black
14 Pure White

[Yamimarik]

Maybe I'm just uber lucky on the RNG front (sometimes I think I am...), but my retainers are constantly bringing me back the rare dyes. They're both over i110 atm though, one is CNJ the other is ACN.
And atm, though I use the pastels and white/black dyes quite often, I have:
28 Pure white
21 Jet Black
18 Pastel Pink
22 Pastel Blue
19 Pastel Purple
60 Silver
57 Gold
(I throw away my Pastel green, I don't really care for that color though, but thankfully I don't see it as much as the other dyes.)

It could be that both my retainers ilvl's are so high that I see such a high frequency of these dyes ionno, but I appreciate them since I constantly use them all but the gold and silver quite often.

[Kouren]

I want black and white dye, but I get pastels and metallics much more commonly. They've all proven fairly rare for me, though. I used several hundred ventures before I saw my first, and I tend to go through gaps of 50~75 before I see another. My retainers have been anything from i90 to i115+ through this process, and I haven't noticed any correlation between that and dye frequency.

[AskaRay]

My ilvl 100 retainer just brought me some pink pastel dye today.

[MaethusXion]

The metallic colors are the most common, followed by black/white, and then the pastels.

Your mileage may vary. Personally I've got tons of the Pastels, only gotten like 7 or so Black, 2 White, and a lot of Metallics. The higher your retainer's ilvl(100+, DoW/M) or more gathering(400+ DoL) the better chances you have. I'm able to get the (current) top-tier for my two Tank retainers, but about 3 or so from top for my DoL.

[Niqote]

Since there is LOTS of Soldiery Tomestones about - just gear your retainers in the gears from Rev. Toll and send them out on quick ventures.

You might not get the colours you want for a little while but you'll get some dyes ^^

Also you will find high iLvL accessories are wearable by any class - use this to your advantage when gearing retainers that are not jobs you usually play (My DRG retainer often wears WHM and SMN gear to bump their iLvL to new heights)

[Shinji_Ryukishi]

My ilvl 112 retainer sucks at bringing me dyes. I'm getting really frustrated, the whole reason I leveled her up was to get metallic silver dye. It's been about a month, hundreds of ventures, and she's only brought me silver once. Black once, gold twice, white twice. Pastels are slightly more common, they don't seem to be particularly rare. But honestly it's really annoying me. I've done all the work, send her on a dozen quick ventures a day, and she bring me crap. It's just dye, there should be a way to get them that isn't 99% impossible.