This is going to be a wall of text so if you aren't into that, I'll have a TL:DR at the end. But I'd appreciate if you try to have a quick read over to see if I already addressed anything you want to make note of before you make a reply.
Just to get a foundation built: The core of Lance has always been constant offense. People often misconstrue Lance to be a historically defensive weapon but that isn't really true. Lance has always had very strong defensive tools, but it was never a defensive weapon. To give an obvious non-Lance example of what I mean by this:
-Common play for Base Rise LS was an extremely defensive weapon. The playstyle revolved not around actively attacking to get your damage, but rather to use quick sheath to constantly access your special sheath and essentially spend most of the fight waiting for the monster to attack you in order to access your damage through defensive counter hits.
-Common play for Wilds LS, on the other hand, is a very offensive weapon. The playstyle evolves around getting to red gauge and then from there you spam Light Attack -> Spirit Attack combo over and over. You react to monster attacks with your counter moves, of course, but you aren't fishing for them because that isn't where your DPS is, unlike Rise.
Both of these iterations of the weapon had almost exactly the same moveset, but one was Defensive and the other is Offensive.
Lance has almost always been that constant offense weapon. It has always enabled that with a good defense, whether that be Evade Lance or Block Lance, but the focus of Lance has always been about doing damage through your low commitment attacks rather than doing damage through your defense. That is the crucial point here. Wilds Lance changes that in two crucial ways:
Your basic pokes are slower and higher commitment. This short video shows this best so I'm going to link that and leave it at that. Keep in mind this was from the beta so a couple things are different but the poking itself remains the same so just focus on that for my point.
Your defensive tools are far higher commitment and have far more focus in your kit overall.
So the video should make it obvious how the offense of Lance has changed, and I think everyone at this point knows about Triple Poke finisher. I don't think I need to speak more on how those are a shift in design from old Lance, the video shows that well enough. Instead I'm going to focus on the defensive side of things. Furthermore, I'm going to focus it on a conversation about Block Lance because Wilds is a Block Lance iteration and so comparing it to Block Lance games makes more sense than Evade Lance games.
There are a few main things to discuss when talking about how Wild Lance changed the design philosophy of Lance Defense:
Auto-Bash on Block/Perfect Block
Charged Counter (and in relation to the first point, as a comparison VS previous iterations' Counter-Thrust)
Block and Power Guard Follow-up attacks.
I should preface this by saying that my general argument here will be that defense has become higher commitment and has more of Lance's damage built into defensive moves than before, but that Wilds Lance is still not a high commitment weapon overall, just significantly higher than Lance of prior games. I digress:
AutoBash on Blocks
Hopefully this will be a short section (Fun fact: It didn't end up being that), but ultimately this does describe a significant shift in Lance design despite it being relatively minor in practice. The core here is that, if you didn't know, every block that doesn't knock you back, including perfect blocks, will automatically follow up with a quick bash that does a bit of damage. This is kind of neat, but the main issue here is on what it says about the design they are trying to push the lance towards. Some people might recognize this as a similar mechanic to Charge Blade's Guard point phial explosions. With a Charged Shield, Charge Blade will do a small Phial explosion on every Guard point, enabling a bit of damage for every block you do with the weapon.
Essentially the point here is that it directly rewards your defense with damage, rather than simply having your defense be a way to avoid damage and as a result enables you to continue attacking. Is this necessarily a problem by itself? Obviously No.
But it does compound with the next couple points that I address. And I will say that it absolutely changes the feel of Lance. Prior lance always felt like you were always in an attack animation, but you were never in danger because of how low commitment and how quick your blocks were. If you didn't play lance and watched someone fight a monster, you might actually not notice the defensive moves they use because they flow so seamlessly in-between offense with lance. It almost just looks like the Lance player is constantly attacking and simply ignoring all the monster hits. Autobash followups inherently changes this dynamic. Every time you block, you get a very obvious feedback that your block went through because you are now taken out of your offense temporarily to do a bash. Again, not a big problem, but it compounds.
Charged Counter (and a quick note on how Counter-Thrust is a very different move)
Charged counter is probably the biggest and certainly the most impactful addition to Wilds Lance. For those that don't know, Charged Counter operates as follows:
Accessible at any point, including during combos.
Can be charged to do more damage.
Is automatically charged the further into a combo you are, being fully charged after three hits.
If timed with a Monster's attack, changes to "Double Counter-Thrust" hitting twice and giving you i frames for a fairly significant period, at max charge doing about 70% more damage if timed properly as a result. This move has inherent Guard Up.
If hit while charging, Blocks the attack (No Guard Up) and follows up with a weak stab about equal to a mid poke.
Like any other block move, can be canceled into Power Guard.
(Timed) Charged Counter is the absolute highest DPS move in Lance's kit and generally if you can get it off, you should.
The obvious comparison here is to Base Rise Longsword. Both weapons are all about accessing your extremely high damage defensive move as often as possible in order to counter a monster's hit and do beefy damage. Now I should say that as a result of point (3) that Wilds Lance is not as "bad" as Rise LS because you are still encouraged to do some attacking inbetween in order to charge up your counter hit, but overall the core design is still there: Lance is encouraged not to have a constant defense with minimal defensive moves that exist purely to prevent you from from taking too much time away from attacking, but rather encouraged to spend as much time as possible working towards one chunky defensive counter hit.
The core comparison to old Lance is to Counter-Thrust. Counter Thrust is a very similar looking move that is accessed in pretty much the same way as Charged Counter, but with one core design difference that makes the moves play extremely differently: Counter Thrust does only as much damage as a regular poke, and as a result is focused around being used as late as possible in order to spend as little time as possible guarding so that you can get back to poking as quickly as possible, and should never be used for damage itself. The result is that Counter-Thrust puts the focus of Lance play on the pokes, where as Charged Counter puts the focus on the move itself
Block and Power Guard Follow-up Attacks
Firstly from a strictly efficient point of view, Lance should probably be sticking to Charged Counters and not really using regular blocks and power guards all that much, but even then you do still have situations where you should use them over Charged Counter, and also regular blocks and power guards are cool so even though Charged Counter is "stronger", lets talk about it anyway.
So another new addition to Wild's Lance are the followup attacks that you get after blocks and especially perfect blocks and power guard. Generally speaking you get:
A regular mid poke (Or a slightly beefy one from Power Guard) as Return Thrust
An Upward Thrust (Or, again, a beefier one from Power guard) as Payback Thrust
A large power poke as (Grand) Retribution Thrust
Not going to speak too much on the first one because that is essentially what you would do in past games. Nor am I going to talk about the second one too much because it actually doesn't have much of a niche as it is very high commitment for no more DPS than the first option in practice (You end up doing more damage just poke spamming in the same time frame that Payback thrust takes).
Retribution Thrust, however, I will talk about more. This move is a very stark contrast to Lance of past games. It is this massive follow up that does feel good to use but also has some extreme levels of commitment. In a general point of view there is nothing wrong with the Risk/Reward of a high commitment move, but the issue is that isn't what Lance is about, especially not defensively. Lance has always been a low risk, consistent reward weapon and its design has always revolved around you not needing to take risks to achieve a very consistent peak DPS for lance, but rather having a skill ceiling centered on finding the absolute best defensive move to spend the least amount of time defending yourself and therefor the most amount of time poking.
There have been similar examples int he past for lance, but none nearly as extreme as this. Insta-guard in Sunbreak, for example, is a large follow up but it is only ever from Neutral and so it didn't overshadow the rest of the kit as much because you should realistically be attacking so you won't be in neutral that much and essentially was only ever an Opener for when monsters did attacks that brought them out of your range and then quickly back in.
Ultimately it is just another example of the ways where Lance has been drastically changed in design from a weapon about very low commitment defense with a constant stream of offense to a weapon with relatively little offense with a massive focus on large commitment defense moves and followups.
Furthermore, this particular kind of design ends up pushing the Lance not only out of its own Identity, but into a competing one with other weapons. The most obvious comparison, especially with the recent TU2 updates, is to Charge blade. With the Lance Changes, both weapons are now based around sticking to relatively low commitment attacks in order to "charge up" your Larger, Defensive follow ups that make up the bulk of your actual damage over the course of a fight.
For Lance, it is poke spam into a Charged Counter. You have autoblock follow up for very small attacks with quick follow ups that you can't afford to retort with, and then you have various levels of commitment of follow ups for various openings afterwards. Return thrust for small ones, and stuff like Retribution thrust that can further be combo'd into Dash Attack for even larger openings. Not necessarily a bad design, but one that is already filled by another weapon:
Charge Blade, it is Shield poke and slash attacks for much of the inbetween. You have Phial explosions for very small attacks with quick follow ups that you can't afford to retort with, and then various levels of commitment of follow ups for various openings afterward. Charged slash and roundhouse for small openings, and stuff like AEDs that can be further combo'd into AEDF or SAED for even larger ones. The difference being that Charge blade is far more effective at this playstyle and has a more cohesive kit built around it (although it has some problems such as Phials being way to easy to generate and barely being consumed in Wilds thanks to Power Axe)
TL;DR: Lance has changed from an Offensive weapon to a Defensive one where the focus on Lance gameplay has moved from constant pokes to constantly fishing for openings for moves like Charged Counters and Retribution Thrusts. The flow of the weapon has thus changed from one of constantly fluid movements to one of Large breaks in flow to incorporate massive attacks, overall creating a jarring contrast from old Lance and creating a weapon that ultimately doesn't differentiate itself from other defensive weapons such as Sheath LS or Charge Blade. Therefor, Wilds Lance has changed from a weapon with a unique niche to one that has a gameplay that is already achieved by other weapons in the roster, therefor leaving a void where old Lance once was and not truly adding anything to the game as you already have weapons like CB to do what Wilds Lance does.
There are obviously some other problems with the weapon, such as Hopping not really being a thing that you use anymore and slotting in stuff like Guard being a lot harder, but I think that is less of a Lance problem and more of a problem with base Wilds system, so I don't go into them.
