Melee DPS

[SpeckledBurd]

As for AoE, they are all good choices. Dragoon is the strongest but even Ninja can be a straight monster once you learn all the ins and outs. If you're wanting to get your feet wet without feeling too overwhelmed, I'd go with Dragoon or Samurai first.

Based on the current Data from Expert Dungeons at least, Samurai actually has the highest AOE potential of the Melee followed by Dragoon, then Ninja, and Monk as the lowest, but the actual performance difference between all of them in AOE is so small as to be negligible.

From what I've gathered playing roughly the four jobs :

Monk is the easy to learn/easy to master melee, limited in its gameplay, that kinda rotates and repeats itself, but it does decent damage and has some nice utility to bring to the party.
Brotherhood is really good to boost physical damage, and boost your own damage as well by giving you a lot of chakra proc, and Mantra is a 20% group healing buff. The job works fine but the over-reliance on positionnals can make it clunky sometimes, and downtime is your worst enemy as you can take forever to build back your ressources if you're not carefull.

I wouldn't exactly describe Monk as easy to learn/master. It's defined by Non-linear combos rather than the 1>2>3 combo steps the other jobs use, so to some it can be a bit harder to wrap their heads around compared to the other melee when it comes to just doing the basic GCD rotation. Doubly so when combined with how positional heavy it is. For some people it can actually come off as intuitive because of that compared to a more straightforward rotation. Another thin to note is most of the jobs post level 54 toolkit is just downtime loss mitigation skills that don't work well so once you've got Elixir Field the job pretty much stops evolving. Also side note, Mantra was also recently nerfed to 10% healing, so while it's a nice additional benefit to the job it really isn't anything game changing.