First thing Id like to recommend is chosing your skills difrently. I tried going with dark embrace, death shroud, obsidian shield, murky cloud and combat jumping right away. Which I highly recommend not doing, I didnt have stamina to do anything, and that was with 3 end redux in every of those skills, and neither did I have enough attacks to build any good amount of rage.
These are just tips that helped me, and might not be good for you and your play style (everyone has their own), but
dark embrace was my only deffence toggle until I got obsidian shield. At lower levels youll seldom get into situations where mobs use anything else than smashing/lethal. I put an end redux in it right away, and slotted it with 3 extra dmg resist by lvl 10. (I didnt get mukry cloud til lvl 30).
At lvl 10 GET obsidian shield. You dont need to keep it toggled all the time, so you save end that way, but when you start playing with lost and the likes, youll be realy realy glad you took it. I got it slotted with 3 dmg resist and 1 end redux aswell.
You dont need taunt. Especially if you are running death shroud at the same time (and soul drain later on also acts as a taunt). CoV sees alot of classes that can take care of themselves with heals and shields, and in bigger groups I find its not much needed, quite the opposite, death shroud gets you too much agro sometimes, if there are 2 tanks, that could mean the death of you and that the other tank cant get any rage to deal that smash we love
(murky cloud does help get smash, but I find that in general I get enough smash without it, and that my survivability in an 8 man team real drops with it on)
Siphon life is great, it has saved my life plenty, but I waited til lvl 26 before I got it, and used dark regen only until then. It costs 33 end vs the siphon lifes 11, but the heal potential is alot greater, and both are fairly instant. Allthough Siphon Life does help build rage, its an expensive rage build and is slow to recharge.
Improving smash means more rage, and having full rage means killing a mob in 2 hits instead of 4. Which means they go down faster, you loose less endurance and less hp (which also means less endurance loss since you dont need to heal). Mobs hitting you gives you rage but also hitting mobs gives you rage, so keeping a constant attack rate helps alot.
That being said, dark melee doesnt give alot of dmg attacks. It has alot of utilities, but at the cost of fewer attacks that does lower damage and without any stun/knockback/ranged abilities that other brutes get. So investing in boxing (which has a small chance of stun) or another extra attack power helps. Jump kick works, but its slow animation makes it not as viable. As for traveling powers, they are all viable. For a dark/dark I realy recommend superjump tho, because getting accrobatics is a must at later levels. Dark armors main weakness is that it has no knockback resistance, (but it is its only weakness, we get resistance to everything, not all powers are as good, fire for instance is weak against cold). Teleport enemy is also a great power for pvp and pve tho, and hover also works, but the movement restriction is a real pain, when you need to be all over the place (which combat jumping helps with).
anyway, that was a bit longer than I first intended, but I hope it helps
