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I've had some experience with the Dark Eldar in the past and when the new Codex came out I was pretty stoked. All of the new models are much cooler than the last edition and it seemed that the updated rules would have beefed them up a bit.
A friend of mine went kind of nuts and spent about $1,500.00 on a huge Dark Eldar army. I told him that he should play test with some smaller forces to see which units would be best, but he didn't listen.
We played a 2000 point game vs nurgle chaos and our expectations were high. Unfortunately chaos seized the initiative and laid waste to about 1500 points in the first 15 minutes. We scratched the game and started fresh, staying in the shadows this time. Our plan was to get in close and assault if all possible. When the assaults started the nurgle chaos just shrugged off most of the wounds that we gave them(6+)
And obliterated all who stood before them.

My question is
Is there any hope for the dark eldar? Even with their incredible initiative, they are so weak. Could they ever have a chance against chaos. Or maybe I am missing something. Any help would be appreciated!

Yes thet have a chance.
You need to hug cover (or create some!) and hit hard and fast.

6th edition has changed the meta so that shooting is much better then assaulting. DE can bring enough poisoned and ap2 weapons to be strong, but are not the easiest to play

Dark Eldar are one of the best armies at killing all versions of space marines very quickly., due to being very quick round the board and having a lot of anti-infantry firepower.

Nurgle stuff can suffer particularly hard as splinters make a mockerey of their high toughness, whilst plague marines etc are expensive.

In CC almost always DE stuff is going first and should be putting out the damage. Picking your fights are key though.

But the thing is - as it sounds like you've found out the hard way - is that there is no other army that can die faster than a DE army if it does not deploy correctly, make good use of cover (or use its speed for cover). It is possibly the most unforgiving army, and this is highlighted by the fact that the Dark Eldar codex actually has a tactics section at the back after the army selection pages, and as far as I know ( i don't have every codex, about half of them) is the only army that does this with the codex.

To win, many players see dark eldar as a pure shooting force, and this can be very competitive with mass venoms and ravagers. Others still like a good mix of combat units in there too, and I have done OK at tournaments still sticking with stuff like Incubi, large wych units etc. But with a combat DE army, as I said above you really need to know if your unit can take the opposing unit you want it to kill, because if your not sure then pick another target, rack up those easy pain tokens and it makes it so much easier later in the game

Mechanised GK and IG are the bane of Dark Eldar though, and can regularly put the utter beat down on even the most experienced DE players with good lists

I recently lost a game to a DE player. His tactic was to hover his skimmers over lethal terrain and shoot LOTS of dakka my way. He also took a Chaos detachment and used telepathy to remove my wraithwing's fearless, then make them not do anything (grr!). As long as they can get cover saves, or do a ton of damage during night fighting, they're an incredibly effective opponent.

That said, I did manage to immobilize one of his skimmers with a scarab base that had taken over a lasgun emplacement. I haven't lol'd that hard in awhile.

Target Saturation is number 1 key for Dark Eldars imho.

A well balanced between Anti-Infantry and Anti-Armor shooting is necessary too.
Like having a good balance between venoms and raiders/ravagers.
Most commonly a list having 100pts/dark light is normal.

Shooting is much better nowadays due to night shields and jink that the skimmers have.
Assault is cool but not as good as shooting in DE imho.

Make use of COVER! Cover is your friend, like seriously no cover = dead DE. There are exceptions but DE don't do well without cover generally.

Make good use of diversion units, harass your opponent at different fronts, divert them from what you actually want to murder them with. I use reavers to harass people in the back so that they run around trying to deal with them instead of taking care of stuff that's going to wipe them out next turn. Muwhahahaha~

Cackle at your opponent regularly so that the fear seeps into them, muwhahahah~

Done properly with a bit of luck and stuff tabling your enemy is not that hard.
Done properly without luck and you should be able to put up a fight.
Done Horribly? Well, there's only one road for Dark Eldars there.

I think the issue you faced lies more with your friends approach. Im basing that assumption on his approach to buying models without having play tested thrm first, consequently without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each unit.

Itd be helpful to know what his list was, and interesting as well. What has he played before? The de are a force equipped with nothing but knives and rapiers, so if hes used to broadsword space marines where you just swing a unit at a target and can expect to do reasonably well, that could account for why they didnt perform as you might expect as they require a different approach.

The quote in the tactics section of the codex is key to remember: death by a thousand cuts. Dont target everr unit on the board, identify your targets by threat vs pay off for attacking them and go from there. Its always worth considering NOT attacking this turn, find cover, hide and outmanoeuvre your opponent, then strike next turn when you have reinforcements arrive.

And there we go. Invest in synergy, have each unit support the others, fething swamp everything, and choose your targets carefully. Always plan ahead, try to predict your opponents moves and have surprises ready.

Also, high strength haemy arcane weapons with dinner plate templates will do wonders to those damned chaos marines!

DE can be a very tough army to play

they get better the more cover is on the field, if you are playing at home on an open table or on the floor DE will lose almost every time.

It is probably easiest to learn how to do short ranged, dance and shoot with DE. Their assault units are either bad, very bad, or take a lot of finesse.

Make sure you put your warriors in raiders with splinter racks and night shields. That enables you to get in range, whilst keeping your opponent out of small and mid arms range, re rolling all misses, which are all poisoned.

The bloody bane of nurgle marines with bolters.

Unfortunately DE assault armies are probably not going to do well.

However, enough Splinter shots will wear down anything with a toughness score. Nurgle pays extra points for toughness, which isn't that great when most DE shooting always wounds on 4s.

Honestly, I've felt bad for Nurgle players when I play them, although I haven't played against a Nurgle army with their new Codex yet... although I don't think it'd change too much.

The problem probably is that you tried to assault with DE. Even Overwatch is a big problem, and the general nerfs to assault units really hit them hard, as well as open topped vehicles exploding with S4 which devastates the infantry riding in venoms and raiders. I haven't DE that much in 6th, in favor of armies that were nerfed less brutally, but whenever I dish out DE, I bring a very different list from the one I liked in 5th.
List writing is very, very treacherous for DE-there are so many tempting units, especially Incubi come to mind, which scream at you to take them, but they became so situational without supoort from other assault units (read:Wyches) who got nerfed into nothingness. The new rules dictate that you should mostly take Warriors as Troops choices and Wyches w/HWG in Venoms as suicide units, always claim your Jink save and try to get Ravager/Flyer help.
This is not to say it's all bad though. 6th edition has brought a shift away from parking lots (mainly due to people overreacting to the changes) and towards high-toughness infantry/bikes and MC, basically AV giving way to T. This makes us a dangerous match for most TAC lists. Ask any Eldar player about a Wraithlord and he'll tell you it's awesome, but against DE it won't last a turn. That's why we need as much poison and lances as we can get, while staying away from combat-the principle of playing to your strengths and covering your weaknesses. However, this is somewhat balanced, and sometimes surpassed, by the shift from long range high strength AT guns to mid strength and mid range dakka dakka dakka, which kills our mandatory dedicated transports like lambs to the slaughter. The new explosion rules don't help either, so assume the unit dies along with the transport when writing your list.
That said, we still struggle against AV12 spam, such as a Guard leafblower, or lists tailored specifically to beat us, i.e. any combination of vehicle spam, preferably AV12, flyers or lots of mid strength dakka, preferably with a long enough range to make our now-mandatory NS ineffective.

2 raiders. 30 kabalites
1 venom. 30 wyches
1 ravager. 2 razor wings
2 pain eng. 2 grotesques
5 wracks. 9 reavers
1 haemonculi. Archon with a few court
10 mandrakes. 5 scourges
5 incubi. 1 beast master with 5 kh and 1 beast
10 hellions. Lelith Hesperus
Urien rakarth. Maybe drazhar.

Definitely need to concentrate on some key tactics with any more additions to the army list.

A list that I would use would be like this:

HQ:
Haemie w/ Hexrifle as base HQ requirement or Liquifier if you are running around with wyches or venom blade or whatever you like, pretty flexible.

Elite:
4 Trueborn w/ blasters // Venom w/ Splinter Cannon (Count as from Kablite warriors)
or
5 Incubi // Venom w/ Splinter Cannon

Troops:
10 Kablite // Raider w/ Splinter Racks, Nightshields
10 Kablite // Raider w/ Splinter Racks, Nightshields
or
10 Wyches w/ Haywire and Hydra Gauntlets // Raider w/ Nightshields, Enhanced Ethersails
9 Wyches w/ Haywire and Hydra Gauntlets // Raider w/ Nightshields, Enhanced Ethersails <- Hamie could go here or just have 10 wyches

Fast:
3 x 3 Reavers w/ Heat Lance
or
9 Reavers w/ 3 Heat Lance

Heavy:
Razorwing w/ 4 monosycthe missiles, flickerfield, nightshield
Razorwing w/ 4 monosycthe missiles, flickerfield, nightshield
Ravager w/ Night Shield

Too few wracks to make them useful could put them as a 5 man unit to stick on objectives, it is only 50 points so if you have point, I guess?

Since there's only 1 Venom the venom is better left for the incubi or Trueborn.

Mandrakes are just plain useless for their point count right now...

10 Hellions is too few for a full unit unless you're at lower points. But if you do you basically have to run him with Baron Sathonyx which is converted from a standard Hellion most of the time.

Same goes for Beast Master, too few to become an effective unit imho, and without the birds I never think beast master is worth taking as they are pretty good in cc.

Urien, unless you run coven list not reason to put him in.

Drazhar is good with the incubi but better off alone killing people.

Pain Engines, are good but not that good when comparing with the others I guess it is possible to try them out and see how they work with the list but imho Ravager > Razorwing ~= Voidrave > Talos > Cronos.
They work if there's more synergy between them, since they act like a bullet magnet most of the time. Might not be a bad idea to field with wyches and incubi for a cc group