Lance Overview

Lances (ランス Ransu) are long weapons that can strike from a distance. The lance is always accompanied by a large shield which generally grants a powerful defense against most attacks. Although slow and difficult to travel with, the weapon's damage output can be impressive. Lances have different moves, such as the upstab, forward stab, and charging attack. Lances are one of the only weapons that can attack and block at the same time. They have a sub-category of weapons known as the Gunlance.

- Weapon Traits :

Lances are powerful Weapons that should not be overlooked. They have the capacity to deal some pretty decent damage. Lances can be found in the 2 main trees (as usual with almost all weapons).  

• Lances have an overall high Sharpness bar compared to other weapons (even though almost no natural white bar of sharpness is available in MHF2.
• Lances come with a shield and are the best blockers in the game (along with Gunlances).
• Lances have a tendency to be accompanied with a defense bonus (although this defense boost is usually minimal). They can be used for tanking but Gunlances are recommended if you choose to take the tanking route.
• Lances come in a wide variety of elements, making them suitable for the every situation. They are not as elementally powerful as the Sword and Shield, however.
• Lances have a long range of attack (due to their length) and have very precise and accurate strikes. This makes them perfect for targeting specific monster parts that other weapons can not reach as easily.
• Lances have a middle to high overall damage. Compared to their cousins, the Gunlances, they have higher damage.
• Hunters can land 2 kinds of stabs: frontal and upward. Both of these can be chained up to 3 times.
• Lance wielders can perform small back jumps and sideways slides. After each evade you can chain 3 stabs in any combination. After a back jump, if you hold the analog stick right or left and press X, you can do a slide dodge in that direction. This is useful if you are unfamiliar with the dodging style and accidentally jump towards a monster.
• After performing one jump (or after attacking), the lancer can perform a large back-step that is longer than the usual back-step. You can do this by pulling back on the analog stick and pressing X during your hop after the initial hop or attack. After the large back-step is performed, you can not chain together any more jumps until you reset your combo. This jump also uses more stamina.
• Lance hunters can perform a charging attack that depletes stamina. The charge is relatively weak but can be finished with a powerful front stab, which is the strongest single Lance attack.
• An effective tactic for the charging attack is to knock the monster down, then charge near a jointed area of the monster (e.g. the joint of a Rathalos back and wing, or the joint of any monsters legs and stomach). You should be running in place towards said joint but still striking the joint, dealing large amounts of damage.
• Lances have the Fast draw and defensive stance abilities.
• Some users complain about the lack of mobility, but by back-hopping in the direction that you want to travel in you can reach your destination faster than if you were walking with your weapon unsheathed. Note: the amour skill Evade Distance Up increases the hop distance of the lance, thus improving evade techniques and unsheathed travel.
• Lances have the special ability to become either an impact or cutting weapon. meaning that the lance will take the higher of the two hit zones. For example, when the lance strikes a Rathalos in the head, the cutting hit zone has a value of 80 and the impact hit zone of the head has a value of 70. The game automatically will select the higher value, in this case the 80 cutting hit zone.
• In MH3 and MHP3rd, the Lance gained several different attacks that make it even more useful than before. The most important of these is a counter-stab that allows the user to deliver an upward stab immediately after blocking an attack. This has made the Lance popular with hunters who favor a more defensive style of playing. Like the SnS, the Lance can also perform a shield bash that deals impact damage. Although now you have to be guarding to press triangle and circle to perform a charge attack.
• In MH4, the lance gains a new attack while performing a charge attack: the hunter can do the normal finisher or they can jump and hit the monster and attempt to mount them as the other finisher.

- Lance Playstyle

  

Evade

• The most difficult lancing technique to master is the evade strategy. The reason why many of the expert players use this strategy is because you can kill a monster much faster by evading than by blocking with your shield
• For this strategy, you will need armor with the skill "Evade+2" (this skill increases the duration of invincibility while rolling/hopping). The skill "Evade Distance Up" (increases roll/jump distance) is not required, but it does make evading a little bit easier.
• Evade+2 will not let you jump through every attack in the game but it lets you evade most of them.
• The way the skill works is as the monster tries to hit you, you press the X button to jump backwards (or any other direction of your choice). If you time the jump correctly you will jump right through the attack without taking any damage.
• This method also helps to save stamina, as back hopping requires much less stamina than blocking.
• You can only evade attacks by hopping through them if the duration of the monster's attack is short enough.
• For example, let's say that you are using low rank Obituary/Butterfly armor which has the skill Evade+2 and you are lancing a Rathalos. The Rathalos' tail swing has a short duration, meaning that if you hop the second that you get hit, you will have successfully have evaded the attack. The fireball attack also has a short duration so if you back hopped through the fireball you will, again, have successfully evaded the attack.
• Now lets say that you are lancing an Akantor with Evade+2 armor. Akantor's charge attack has a long duration, so it is only possible to evade the attack by physically moving out of the way. If you back hopped, once you finished with your jump you would still be in the way of Akantor's charge so you would get hit.
• The trick to evading through attacks is only to hop through attacks that have a short duration (tail swings, fireballs, bites, claw swings, etc.).
• The more experience you gain by using the lance, the easier it will become to determine the correct time and place to either evade or guard.
• One of the most useful armor sets would be the Narga X armor from Monster hunter freedom Unite. It gives evade +2 and evade distance up without the need to socket. The set also has a high amount of armor when fully upgraded and plenty of extra slots. (it's kind of the set you must have)

Guard

• The guarding strategy is the easier of the two primary lancing strategies, but by using this strategy you won't be able to kill monsters as fast as you could have using the evade strategy
• Evading may be used to be able to kill monsters fast, but guarding is not totally useless. That big shield is there for a reason. There are certain attacks that are much easier to defend against by guarding and there a few monsters, such as Black Gravios, that can be killed much quicker by shielding against their attacks.
• If you plan to block most of the monster's attacks, then a good armor skill to have would be "Guard+1" (there is an upgrade to this skill, Guard+2, that increases the skill's effectiveness but is rarely useful because Guard+1 will almost always do the trick)
• The skill Guard+1 reduces the stamina required to block an attack as well as reducing the knock-back of attacks. This means that for most attacks you won't get pushed back at all from blocking. This is very useful because it saves stamina and the time you save from not getting pushed back helps to reduce the your hunting time. Guard+2 increases these abilities further but it is not worth the slots because Guard+1 should be adequate for the majority of your hunts.
• Another skill that can be very useful against certain monsters is "Guard Up". This skill makes any previously unblock-able attacks now block-able. For example, the Plesioth's beam attack, Gravios's beam attack, and the Khezu's shock blast attack are all unblock-able attacks that will go right through your shield if you attempt to block them. With Guard Up, all of these attacks become block-able so now every attack in the game is block-able.

• The one downside of Guard Up is that some monster's do not have any unblock-able attacks which makes this skill useless against them. If you are fighting a Rathian, you can already block all of its attacks anyways without Guard Up which means that if you are using Guard Up during that fight it becomes a waste of valuable slots. Skills such as Guard+1 would've been much more useful in that situation.

• The way to fight a monster using a lance is simple. All you have to do is hit the monster a few times, back hop (it doesn't matter which direction you hop in) and hold block (its faster to cancel a combo with a hop and then shield than to stop attacking, wait for your character to get back into ready stance and then hold down the block button).

• Remember, do not get too greedy with your attacks or you will end up getting hit.

• Remember, just because these evading and guarding sections are listed under "lance techniques" doesn't mean that if you aren't using one of these strategies you're doing it wrong.

• It is up to the hunter to develop his/her own strategies and use whichever one they feel the most comfortable with.

• Some may find that they like using an even combination between guarding and evading and use an armor set with Evade+2 AND Guard+1 while others might feel more comfortable using only guarding techniques.
• The new counter-stab move introduced in Tri makes the guarding strategy much more useful, as it allows a hunter to quickly raise their shield after attacking, then attack immediately after guarding against a monster attack.

- Pros and Cons :

  

Advantages

• The Counter-stab maneuver allows the wielder to quickly cancel an attack combo to raise his shield, and then immediately keep attacking after blocking a monster attack. (MH3 Onwards)
• Incredible range.
• Considerably good attack power.
• Many lances also give defense boosts.
• Most effective guard out of all blademaster weapons.
• Good sharpness.

Disadvantages

• Dodging is somewhat limited.
• Small variety of attacks.
• Hard to wield for beginner.

- Tutorial for Beginner Hunter (by GaijinHunter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bikIBt4hs4