In the beginning of my first dawnguard playtrough most vampires dropped vampire gauntlets, then suddenly they stopped.
Started an new game and no gauntlets, looked in the CS and its appears that it's not part of the leveled lists.

Anybody have an idea what is going on here?

Vampires never dropped gauntlets for me. I always had to buy some from the vampire merchant.

Same for me. I never had any vampires drop gauntlets. I always get mine from Hestla.

Its very strange, as I say in the beginning it was an common drop. Then it suddenly went away.
And I bought Dawnguard late so it's not something who was removed in an patch.

I've had one guantlet drop...they can be as rare as hen's teeth.

I've had exactly one vampire gauntlet drop since I got Dawnguard about two/three months ago. They are rare as heck.

I know who drops the gauntlet but that would be considered a spoiler.

Mostly it's the Mysterious traveler who has the vampire gauntlets on him so it all boils down to how often you have a run in with him. On my first ( main character ) play through I only bumped into him twice in 60 hours of playing through DG but now on my second run through I've bumped into him a dozen or more times in around 20-30 hours of gaming. So it's all a matter of how often you have rare encounters, it's the same way with werewolf encounter, some say that they bump into werewolves just about every night where as others ( like myself) have only ever had 2 werewolf encounters since DG release.

Keep an eye out for the Mysterious traveler and you will get you vampire gauntlets, you could try and force an encounter by fast traveling to every city but this will also bring about more vampire attacks so it comes with a " catch 22 "

I found a pair sitting on a shelf in Castle Volkihar, that's the only pair I've found.

Very strange, the first character who I was playing then I installed Dawnguard found lots of them.

Anyway, current Character has not started Dawngurd yet. No vampire attacks but two strange random encounters.
First was pretty standard, and vampire and thral on a road close to lakeview manor, the other was real strange, just outside the farms around Whiterun I came over three vigilantes of Stendar who changed into hostile vampires as I got close enough.

If you look around where the vampires were, you will find three bodies of the Vigilants, they were murdered and impersonated by the Vampires to attract potential victims. Its quite common.

Vampires never dropped any gauntlets for my characters, both got two pair from the castle, and kept going back for more, along with the royal armor

I also know......

I actually picked up a pair off a shelf...not in Castle Volkihar...and that was after reading and posting on this thread earlier.

Just put it in spoiler tags then

The vampire gauntlets are dropped by


My current character has 12 pairs so far. I sold 2 or 3 before deciding to collect them. No other vampires that I encountered wear the gauntlets.