system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[MCU/Black Panther] why does the most technologically advanced nation on Earth still fight with spears?
gpt
Correction: they're spears *that shoot fricken' laser beams*. You know how guns with bayonets are just guns that happen to do some spear-like things? Their weapons are essentially spears that do some gun-like things. But there's a lot of reasons, from the practical to the cultural.

From a technological standpoint, there have been times where armor completely outclasses almost all forms of personal weapons, including ranged weapons. Remember that these people have energy shields and vibranium armor (not sure how widespread the latter is, though; it could just be limited to Black Panther), which treat bullets like soap bubbles. In such a scenario, melee actually works better than ranged because it's easier to target gaps in the armor or bypass energy shields (it still has to let "slow"-moving things like air through). Even if there's 100% armor coverage, the body is still vulnerable to grappling and attacks that exploit one's own biomechanics - in the late medieval age, this is how armored knights fought each other since nothing short of artillery could reliably penetrate plate armor (even the early guns were ineffective).

From a cultural/historical perspective, Wakanda hasn't had a *serious* war in its entire history until the MCU - they've never fought against an opponent with roughly equal resources, manpower, and technology. Thus, they have no incentive to improve upon the laser spears that served them in the past. There's almost no material on Earth that could stand up to a blast from one, and the few armors that *can* tank a few shots are better attacked in melee, as noted above.