All back slot items should take patterns for all other back slot items.

Yesterday I realized that I had been depriving myself of a large amount of stat points by not wearing an enchanted back slot item. A lot of my equipment comes from other times where I've played this game, and I didn't realize that cloaks, wings and quivers had become a powerful addition to your stat pool until someone mentioned it.

Ok, no problem, someone in my guild had a quiver with a whopping 23 intelligence on it for sale, that's better than my sage's sash, so of course I'm going to buy it. I'll just pattern it out to look like my trusty cloak again and... oh.

Seriously?!

You're simply not allowed to make your back slot item look like a backslot item of another type. In fact you don't even seem to be allowed to craft backslot items with whatever stats you want, which is why wings and quivers apparently wind up with more int than cloaks frequently.

There is an option to hide your back-slot item completely, so you can't argue that the reason you're not allowed to change the type of it is because it's needed to communicate to other players what your equipment is. It makes sense that you can't change a polearm into a dagger, or platemail into a robe, because looking at a character should tell you something about their capabilities. When it comes to items that are essentially purely cosmetic though there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to make them look however you want.

This seems to be a clear instance of "Don't tell the players how to play", a cosmetic slot on your character should be allowed to look like any other item that goes in that slot, even if the items in it retroactively received stats.

 

Yes please.