The stats screen is affected.
I felt some of the time the character was a bit lacking in attack DPS, didn't realise why at the time. Not enough to notice until I equipped the gold weapon and watched the stats drop.
EDIT:
Closed and restarted the game, and rolled a new character. The first item dropped showed the issue.
This (at least on my PC) is repeatable, not save game related, and unavoidable. Bit of a game breaker for me.