Easy question and I am learning how things work. I have two of these rings and curious if they stack? I know TWO rings of deflection will not stack but does the bonus granted by using a hatchet stack with a ring of deflection?

 

Thanks!

As far as I can tell, they stack. Two ways you can check:

 

1) In your inventory, just unequip one and see if you lose deflection

2) On your character sheet, browse your active effects and see if either says suppressed

Thanks, will do!

Two hatchets stack with eachother, so that's a nice tactic to get some additional damage early game. They're still weak weapons though, don't expect to do much damage.

I think the rule is this:

The bonus of both your hand slots stack with the highest buff of the rest of your equipment.

 

The reasoning is that the buffs on weapons/shields are used to distinguish them and if some of them could be overridden by the rest of your equipment, that would make that choice of weapon/shield strictly worse than other weapons/shields where you can't have the additional effect on equipment.

For example, you can have deflection (hatchet) on rings and cloaks, but you can't have 'Best of Slash/Pierce' (Sword) on equipment other than weapons, so making weapons suppress their boni would make the hatchet inferior to the sword in terms of special abilities (disregarding attack speed and damage). Therefore weapons stack with equipment to maintain the tradeoffs associated with them.