According to the way this system is working right now, weapon stats and perks are only applied when they are in your hands. Unsheathed.
The most evident example of this behavior is the Sword and Shield, as you can actually hear a sound when sheathing and unsheathing that tells your stats are lowering and getting back up.
And as @Khazadurin has remarked above, while you open and loot any chest or container, weapons and shields go back to their sheathed state. Because, well… In this game mimics aren’t a thing, I guess. So you don’t need to keep yourself armed while looting, lol.
They still will grant you luck when you kill something, though.
Obligatory ‘RNG is RNG’ post.
also as a superstition, remove your gear and put it back on before you head out for farming runs.
people have been saying for a while now that there seems to be bugs involving luck gear
Remove the pearls out of your armor. Your playing with 2 different roll tables. I have farmed 100’s of hours, elite zones, chest runs, Laz and Gen. I was told by a few people to remove the pearls and run whatever other gems and since then I have farmed another 100 hours and have gotten much better and reliable drops.
Supposedly there is a bug/feature that pearls override luck in gear instead of stacking with luck perk. And luck seems to work inconsistently anyway. RNG is difficult to tell.
Even if luck is working perfectly as intended, just having that kind of stat is detrimental to rewarding and fun gameplay anyway IMO. Players are supposed to gimp themself for a change of getting bit more rewards?
Also droprates may or may not have been nerfed.