So what is a good Sword+Shield/Spear+Shield combo?

[JnEricsonx]

Yes, Defense, obviously, but my Conqueror will be lousy with a spear? I wanna make a 300 style warrior so bad, switching from sword to spear with ease.

[Neonimus]

Try the Corsair: Rogue/Defense. Absolutely a strong class which can profit from spears a lot through Blade Honing. Also it uses shield-skills effectively. It's really a sweet class since it is not extremely easy to play with and in comparison with conqueror offers a challenge in fights as well as in choosing items/gear.

[Irma2]

There is no reason to go sword when you have spear. You can do it for aesthetic reasons but the toon will be weaker while using the sword. The main reason to go spear is to make use of piercing damage and its feature of bypassing armour. That mostly entails using Hunting, which offers Take Down, Wood Lore and Volley bonuses for spears but none for swords.

Even in non-Hunting builds, piercing damage will usually be exploited through big single hits, like Lethal Strike or Phantom Strike. With its innately higher piercing conversion and higher base damage, the spear outperforms the sword by a long way in this regard.

There is an argument for using sword if you have proc skills like the Defense shield passives and want to attack as quickly as possible to get off more procs within a given time frame. But increasing attack speed is not that hard, so you'll get to a point where the spear's higher base damage and higher piercing conversion trump the sword's attack speed.

Swords and axes are the weakest weapons in the game, unfortunately. By all means, make a spear and sword toon if that is the "look and feel" that you want. But in my experience, aesthetics tends to take a back seat to effectiveness, especially in the higher difficulties.

About the best combo would be Slayer with dual wielding swords in one weapon slot and spear/shield in the other. At least that way, your swords would get the benefit of Weapon Training and the Dual Wield tree to help them keep pace with the spear. But it takes a TON of skill points to develop all the required skills so +5 or even +6 to all skills would be required. And, again with maxed out attack speed, dual wielding clubs would outperform swords.

About the only build I can think of where swords are best is intelligent melee fighters who are doing their damage via elemental additions to weapon attacks and thus thrive on the fastest attack speed throughout. Because they are not dependent on the physical damage of the sword itself, its low base damage is not an issue.