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.

[Seabhacgra]

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.

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

[Eliadil]

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

Because in expert dungeons now tanks often do the biggest pulls possible, so there's a ton of trashmob to aoe. Definitely worth to AoE there, and even tho the buildup is big, once you've passed it you'll be the one clearing the trash pack in a few GCDs.

Don't forget that we basically have a 540potency AoE every 5 GCD
While the other AoEs may not be as strong as Dragoon's, you technically have more raw damage by this spell alone, and I'm not even counting the Shifu/Jinpu buff, which makes your AoE 13% stronger AND faster

[Yandere-chan]

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

This is greatly mitigated by building your buffs on mobs following the tank (sprint helps), as well as building up kenki during the gathering process too. If you have no prep time for whatever reason (maybe the mobbing phase in Copy Factoy?), I actually like to use Meikyo Shisui to put Shifu and Jinpu on. Normally this isn't a good idea, but if the mobs are going to die fast, which they should, you have no time to build it normally, so just buffing up right away is better since you'll get way more out of your powerful ocgd abilities like Guren, Kaeshi: Goken, and Kyuten. You never want to be manually putting on Shifu and Jinpu though after a large number of mobs are already together. You lose at minimum 4 aoes, and that's with skipping the Sen finishers, with at 8+ mobs, is a huge potency loss.

[Seabhacgra]

So with my Samurai at 80 now with decent gear I opted to try out Ninja for a while and have had alot of fun with it.. I realize it's nowhere near the DPS output of a Samurai, and my hands tend to ache from the many buttons, but it's fun. I last played Ninja back in ARR and loved it then, thought I might still like it. Can someone explain the pros and cons of the Ninja? I'd like to weigh them against the Samurai as I enjoy both, just uncertain which one I prefer, thanks!