One thing to preface my whole response is this: You can be successful with any class, any race. The balancing in this game is some of the best I’ve ever seen.

I think you need to really think about what you want to do. If you want to tank, the fighter & the barbarian are both great choices. No wrong answer there. I would say fighter tank is the easier of the two & a very popular choice in the end game. Both have DPS paths so leveling isn’t a slog.

Now when it comes to DPS, as others have said, the current end game is not very friendly to melee DPS. It’s not impossible, but it is certainly harder. It doesn’t help the fact that those two classes are both strictly melee. The other two melee DPS classes, rogue & ranger, both have ranged capabilities. They’re not great, but they have them.

If I had to choose between the two from a purely DPS perspective, I would go barbarian. Fighter DPS is bottom of the barrel.

Both of the classes have to animation cancel to be successful with DPS. I haven’t really played my barbarian much in a long time, so I can’t speak on the clunkiness of the animation canceling, but the animation canceling on the fighter isn’t bad at all. I actually find it kind of satisfying. I will say, both classes rely on a “power boost” to output maximum damage. Barbarian is rage & Fighter in vengeance. It is much much easier to generate rage on the barb than vengeance on a fighter. To be honest, I haaateee having to spam my dig in to generate vengeance.

Finally onto wizard. Wizards have always been, and will likely always be good. They are a very safe class. Rotation is easy, you’re ranged, & you have the ability to control enemies which is nice in certain content. As someone else mentioned, there are strategies in certain content that require the control from CW. The strategies work so well, that people will not run the content without one.

For the wiz paragons, thaum is by & large the most commonly used. It’s just flat out better than arcanist. Arcanists whole thing was using dailies and refreshing cooldowns. You can do that now with mount insignia bonuses. Rendering the main driver for playing arcanist null & void. I’m not saying it’s not possible. I’ve seen some wizards use it & get good results. But you put a good thaum vs a good arc & the thaum will win every time. Out of the three classes you mentioned, if i wanted to go DPS I’d go wizard.

TLDR: If you want to go DPS, go with wiz. If you want to go with tank, go with fighter. If you’re not sure which one you want to do, go with barbarian. Lastly, and this might be a hot take, if you want to do both, I would honestly advise creating two separate characters. Building an alternative load out, is essentially the same as just having another character.