How would YOU make DRK work ?

[Darkstride]

Stat manipulation and balancing HP/MP draining.

Dread Spikes(MP): buff that absorbs health when hit

Drain (MP): drains health

Absorb [stat]: temporarily lowers enemy stat while buff your own. Should atleast be one for STR, VIT, INT.

Punishing Barbs: self buff that redirects a % of damage back to the attacker.

Sanguine Rite: self buff that temporarily converts a small portion of incoming damage to MP.

Corruption: self inflicted DoT that slowly drains health, and stores the damage in a pool. Hate generation and damage output are increased while it is active. Re-using this ability stops the effect, consuming the pool to deal the stored damage to the target.

Souleater (TP): single target attack. Creates a debuff that causes a small % of HP Drain from all attacks for all party members.

Reaper (TP): single target attack. If the target is under the effect of Souleater debuff, the effect if changed to Reaper which drains a small % of TP from all attacks for all party members.

Consume (TP): single target attack. If the target is under the effect of Reaper, it changes the effect to Consume, which drains a small amount of MP from all party member attacks on the target.

Darkness: consumes a small % of health each cast to create an AoE blast with high hate generation. Each cast causes a stack of Darkness buff on yourself which increases the hate generation and damage output of the next Darkness cast, but also the self-HP drained (sort of like Astral Fire stacks).

Dark Harvest: consumes all stacks of Darkness to unleash an AoE HP Drain. Power increases per stack of Darkness.

^So, you can spam Darkness for damage and hate generation at the cost of your own health. Risk vs reward. Follow it up with Dark Harvest to reset Darkness stacks on yourself and recover HP to survive.

Souleater, Reaper and Consume can be rotated to aid the group and allow them to drain the target. It would add support similar to Bard, but by debuffing the boss rather than buffing the party. It would work similar to Drain Samba from Dancer in FFXI.