In a question I asked, the gauntlets were said to be considered an armor/shield type of equipment instead of being a weapon (in the comments of this answer), despite their listing in the weapons page. This was due to them being part of 2/3 of all armors.
If gauntlets are in fact armor, does that mean that spiked gauntlets are actually armor with armor spikes?
My reason for asking is are both parts able to be enhanced on their own, much like armor and armor spikes can be? So the gauntlets could be enchanted to provide an … armor(?) bonus and their spikes enchanted to increase their offensive attack?
Which would mean that when you enchant just gauntlets they should be providing an AC bonus instead of an attack bonus?
Best Answer
No, it doesn’t mean that at all.
Gauntlets are weapons. They are listed in the weapons table, and described in the weapons chapter. They are explicitly described as having “weapon features.” You use them to attack and deal damage. They are weapons in literally every way anything could possibly be a weapon, and there is absolutely no indication anywhere that they should be anything else.
For that matter, being armor doesn’t make something automatically not a weapon; after all, shields are quite explicitly both. You can enhance a shield as a weapon or as armor, or both, and those enhancements are entirely separate. So even if we buy that gauntlets are also armor items, that wouldn’t stop them from being weapons or gaining weapon enhancements.
But we should not buy that, because it’s clearly untrue. Gauntlets come for free with most suits of armor, but the armor item is the entire suit. You could not wear just a pair of gauntlets, and expect any AC bonus. You could not enhance those gauntlets and expect that to produce any AC bonus, either. At best, you could make gauntlets of armor like the bracers of armor, but then you’re crafting them as a wondrous item, not as real armor.
Pathfinder has a lot of weird, counter-intuitive, or hidden rules, but it doesn’t have things that are consistently called one thing in half a dozen places, but are secretly not that thing but actually a different thing altogether, despite never getting called that thing. That would be madness well above and beyond even the twistiest RAW lawyering.