It's safer to always percent-encode all characters except those defined as "unreserved" in RFC-3986.
unreserved = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"
So, percent-encode the plus character and other special characters.
The problem that you are having with pluses is because, according to RFC-1866 (HTML 2.0 specification), paragraph 8.2.1. subparagraph 1., "The form field names and values are escaped: space characters are replaced by `+', and then reserved characters are escaped"). This way of encoding form data is also given in later HTML specifications, look for relevant paragraphs about application/x-www-form-urlencoded.