Should gauntlets have an attack value for those people interested in hand to hand. in oblivion the daedric (?) gauntlets had spikes but were the same as no gauntlets damage wise. it all depended on skill.
but you could svck at blunt but the daedric hammer still does like 8 damage.

Fallout had 'unarmed' weapons, if Bethesda liked the idea they may have taken something like that to Skyrim too.

hand to hand isn't that bad, i was at level 1 meleeing the living [censored] out of trolls with all my swords broken (on 50% difficulty) the trick is that you just need to keep pounding and not defending or they will recover from the damage, its rather reallistic if you think about it, you get hit and you recover in a few seconds (irl), if you keep getting hit without delays inbetween you're gonna be screwed.

I want a Dwemer Power Fist!

Marksman wasn't bad at level 1 either.

In real life you gotta get hit with very powerful punches that would make you straggered like oblivion with every punch

I don't think gauntlets should have an attack value but there should be hand-to-hand weapons...

Hand-to-hand weapons or not, I'd just settle for "Cast on strike" enchantments that could be applied to Rings that only activated when punching.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Spiked_Gauntlets

Fist-weapons.

That is all.

No. Hand-to-hand will svck forever because Todd wills it. D:

Gauntlets should effect punch, after all, did you look at the Daedric Gauntlets? They have fecking spikes on them! If you hit somebody wearing a Metal Gauntlet it's going to do considerably more damage then bare fisted and so gauntlets should increase damage, on the flip side however, they should slow it slightly since they aren't exactly weight free. This would make it so that there is slightly more damage over time but less attacks over all with the harder/heavier gauntlets that you use. That'd make it so the potential damage goes up, but you'd have to be more accurate to take advantage of it too, less punch Spam then Oblivion allowed.

Then they would be classified as weapons, and not armor. And then people would just be outraged that their brand new cestus (cestii?) didn't protect them. Of course, there is always outrage about *something* when it comes to... well, pretty much anything. Find an online forum for _____ and somebody on it is [censored]ing about something. :shrug: but that's neither here nor there.

I say just forget about it and let gauntlets be protective. Perhaps HtH combat will be better in Skyrim anyway.

I'm sure they could give gauntlets two values, one being armor and the other damage.

Rather then do it as weapons, it could simply be that the damage and speed were effected by gauntlet weight, not entirely perfect, but a good compromise I think, they still protect and then it's physical weight that adds damage and effects punch speed.

The could be classified as armor AND weapon.This way,shields could go to that category too thus affecting the damage of shield bash.
Perhaps there could be attack-oriented and defense-oriented ones so the player would have to choose wiser,or how s/he wants to use it.

Exactly. Look at any gauntlet in an Oblivion armor set. If you look at the weapons sets (for ones that have armor and weapons like Elven and Steel) it would always be weaker than a dagger. Weaker than a dagger is still stronger than nothing. It is close, if not the same, with shields. You may have to multiply the shield defense rating by something ranging from .25-.75 to make it less powerful than many of the other weapons.

I would support it if it was done like the witcher 2 button mashing and combos

Yes, it always bothered me how if I had no weapon out, and punched someone, using Daedric Gauntlets wouldn't do more damage, that's just absurd with those spikes. One punch with those things would kill anyone on the receiving end.
I'd love for gauntlets to have a "hand to hand" value added to them, so that higher level gauntlets did more damage when used for punching.

If it were possible to retain the armor value and assign weapon damage to them, I think metal gauntlets should absolutely provide a damage bonus for hand-to-hand. If they can be either armor or a weapon but not both, then I would prefer they stay armor.

After some thinking I think that it would be a good idea, but that make it so that H2H doesn't depend only about it.
I think that there should be two kinds of H2H combat.
Classic brawl style and martial art style (perks?).

Classic brawl style would gain extra damage from gauntlets and would be used in case you get disarmed, have your weapon broken or anything else that forces you into H2H combat.
Basically it should be made as secondary fighting skill and for people who prefer brawl style fighting instead of anything fancy.

Martial arts style should work with system I've already posted about gazillion times and will not do it again (if I do, I'll make thread of my own about it), but the idea is that martial arts H2H style combat can be used as primary combat, doesn't get bonuses from gauntlets, but goes for unarmed and unarmored style of combat, can combine magic with it (flaming palm, lighting fist, telekinetic strike, etc.), but can also go for full physical style combat and be equally effective as one combined with magic, also has kicks and more.
There could still be some H2H weapons like katar, but there should be a way to allow players to go into purely unarmed and unarmed combat and be effective with it if they want to.

Edit:
I'll work on this some more and post it in thread of my own with more detail when I'm done with it.