The best melee?

Hey all, as the title states, which currently is the best melee to play. I kinda enjoy them all, so I'm trying to choose the best, so far I've concluded that sins are the damage machines and warriors can do nice damage aswell, and also soak much damage, and well, dervs are somewhere in between. So I'm trying to decide, which would be the best for PvE, mostly HM and a bit of NM. So, War, Sin, or Derv? Also, don't take into account farming, don't bring this into it. Thanks

Wow, you are opening a whole can of worms with this request. It will go something along the lines of: they can all work pretty well in PvE, it depends upon your playstyle - most people will tell you this because its true.

Having said that, its like ice cream - there isn't really a "best" flavour, but I bet most people could tell you their favourite. So, with this in mind, I'd go for a warrior myself - really powerful when used correctly and with the ability to spam "Save Yourself" which is possibly the best PvE skill in the game and will turn every one of your team mates into a walking talking tank.

Both Dervs and particularly sins can spam SY! too, but not as well as the warrior.

I agree with Distilled in that there is no correct answer.

However my opinion is that a crit scythe is the best... dishing out tonnes of damage, even though sometimes you can die a little more than a warrior, the extra damage more than makes up for this imo.

Sins will net you the most dps with crit-scythe*cant take SY tho!) and blossom bars..followed closely by a warrior with WE-scythe.

Tho a warrior get a shitton more disruption with earthshaker.

Dervs currently fall behind BOTH warrior and sin with scythe usage, and even possibility ranger too..

Sin or war, either are top choices.

Right, it's all about opinions. But what you'll do is take the average and assume that one to be the best in YOUR opinion.

I'd say mine would be the assassin, with daggers. Prosin goes pewpew.

Elementalist definitely!! Even highly experienced PvE Warriors like Tenebrae admit that Elementalists deal more damage than Warriors because of Conjure Frost.

Looooooooooooooool.

Seriously though, (almost) everything works in PvE. PvE has been getting easier and easier and easier with every update to the point when "best" becomes unclear. I'd recommend Assassin regardless in case your interests change, just so you have easy access to Shadow Form.

With as many damage buffs as you can get; Assassins. Their high attack rate with double strikes basically means the bonus damage is triggered much more often than with their contenders.

With Mark of Pain (and possibly Splinter Weapon if you don't have GDW) then a Hundred Blades Warrior is exceedingly powerful when targets are called and the enemy is reasonably well balled up.
The Warrior also gets Earthshaker - a useful hammer build that can really make a Warrior useful.

The Dervish is fairly unspectacular in comparison, but is still very strong (he'll still kill things no problem) - he doesn't shine out like the other two.

Each melee has their role. For organized group work as a damage based tank I'd go warrior, can soak the damage while living to ball the group for the rest of the team.
If single target type stuff, cleanup or general pve I prefer sins, they can get some nice bonus damage using their seconday, dervish for scythe, monk for strength of honor or ele for conjure as an example.
Lastly for organized aoe damage I prefer dervish, splinter weapon on a dervish is very effective at taking down groups.
My opinion is mainly based of my guild, we do balanced so use warrior tanks for DoA(sword) Urgoz and FoW(both hammer). For FoW we also bring dervish for the AoE and sin for clean up.

tl:dr i prefer sin for general pve, uses for all as seen above

Highest non-utility raw damage: Derv and sin, crit scythe-way
Highest utility-AOE damage: 100b War
Highest utility-single damage: DS War
High damage: Dagger sins
Decent damage: Every other melee conditioned on balling

Sins have great damage, but it mainly comes from DB spam and critscythe, which are quite mind-numbing.

Dervs only really have the derv critscythe and some supporting caster roles.

Warriors are by far the most versatile; they have Urf Shaker, Hundred Blades, Dslash, several Warrior's Endurance builds, and more. Also, they're the most honorable.

for HM missions, vanquishing, etc., I would place my vote with a warrior running d-slash+SY. Decent single target dmg and shutdown, party wide armor protection.

As previously mentioned, you can't say one is better than the others. For example, if you know there are going to be big mobs then 100B/MoP will do massive amounts of damage, whereas if you're only going to be small mobs you're better off single target damage.

as others said, 'best' is a totally subjective term. So if you want a better answer, you better narrow your definitions.

My *personal* favorite melee to play based purely on a combination of fun and effectiveness is the crit scythe sin. Especially in these War in Kryta missions and bounties, where there are multiple rezzers, you need to spike those bastards down ASAP so they don't chain rez.

Something a bit more mellow would be any of a wide variety of sword/axe warriors, or 1-2-3-4 repeat dagger sins. There are some new mega-kd hammer builds since hammer skills got buffed but I haven't tried them out.

And for me, dervs have been pure suck. Not enough energy, dps, or survivability for my tastes.

Thanks, you've all got some good points here. As I said I quite enjoy playing them all, but leaning towards sin now, due to the extreme damage.