Like yourself, I am fairly new and leveling a hoplite character (currently level 27), and I still haven't found a spear that I am comfortable with. I've tried all of the spears, the ashwood pike, and the double sided lance but overall I've used the war spear the most.
I found the Ashwood pike's range to be too much for my playstyle. I kept failing at keeping people at the longer range and soon found the single attack direction a hindrance once I was able to drop my shield. On the flip side the shorter double sided lance (and the 150 range spears to an extent), allowed opponents to easily get in and "face-hug" me rendering my stab useless. Besides backpedaling the only option you have at this point is to switch to 2h which is impossible without getting hit when you are getting spammed by two-handers. I'm currently testing the shortened spear which is amazingly fast compared to the 95 speed warspear but has a much shorter range (120) and less of a punch. Next I'm going to try the battlefork, while it doesn't have the look or the speed that I want it's length looks ideal for me and the thrust and swing damage are both impressive.
What I have found:
- Do not expect to get a lot of kills. This can be frustrating and the current scoring method often makes it embarrassing.
- The spear thrust can easily be held off and rendered useless by your opponent holding a downblock while they close in on you.
- The speed penalty from using a shield makes reacting to a dropped downblock in time to get a hit nearly impossible. (This is bad mechanics in my opinion).
- Try to use your spear as a two-handed weapon as much as possible. This really does defeat the purpose of a hoplite character and requires you to learn manual blocking, but is the only option you have against opponents holding a downblock or spamming you with a stupid fast two-hander.
- Get your shield skill up to 5 and use a huscarl or similar beefy shield. I found that far too often the weaker or less skill intensive shields were easily broken and then I became a pincushion.
- As others have mentioned, you won't do well in 1vs1 situations with your shield unless you put enough points into one handed weapons to use them effectively. On that note, you are limited to using a 0 slot weapon or smaller shield since the huscarl and other heavier shields use 2 slots and the spears take up the remaining 2 slots.
- Hoplite looking armor does not exist
- Teamwork is needed to really make hoplites effective without this you're left in a "supporting" role which means that you wound dozens of players and others kill them or you steal kills from players who were probably doing fine on their own.
On that thought, it would be great to have a scoring system that wasn't purely based on K/D ratio. Kill assist points like in BF3 where you get an amount of points equal to how much damage you did on an opponent would be great.
Final thought: Even though I would consider the Hoplite less effective and harder to play than other "classes" I am having the most fun so far. I often aid archers with my shield and pokey stick and participate in making shield walls that usually are not taken advantage of but it adds a little to the game.
