The best way to max out your damage as an ele is to boost your element of choice as high as possible. In your case, purchase a Pyromancer's Aura/Flame's Eye (head armour) and attach a rune of Superior (or Major if you can't afford it) Fire Magic to it, resulting in 16(15 with Major) Fire magic.
The best items to equip as a Fire ele... It's all personal preference here, 22 months of being an ele tells me that, for general PvE, a wand and offhand with 20% half casting time and half skill recharge times for Fire Magic is the 'best' set for PvE, allowing you (sufficient energy provided) to be able to fire off more spells faster than other weapon choices. Which is, as a Fire ele, what you really need to be doing to pull your weight in a team.
On to my next point... energy management! Perhaps the single most important skill a caster can learn in GW, being able to manage your energy allows you to stay effective throughout a battle, particularly useful (from a PvE perspective) in long battles with constant enemy reinforcements, or where you have to hold and defend a position. As an ele, this is primarily done through the use of specific skills (as opposed to say, a monk, who conserve energy with efficient casts) - eles have, without a doubt, the best non-elite energy managing skills in the game. Glyph of Lesser Energy, as it is at the moment, is incredible - so much so, that even non-ele casters use it over their own class' energy skills.
Glyph of Lesser Energy (GoLE is a common abbreviation) combined with an Attunement spell for your element (Attunements are enchantments that return energy when a spell is cast) is a pretty darn good way for you to keep energy high. [skill]Fire Attunement[/skill]
The next way of making your damage even better - good skill selection. Despite what many elementalists (in-game, at least) think, spamming Flare ad infinitum simply won't cut it for damage. The Fire ele's main strength lies in his ability to do damage over an area, however, these AoE skills come with hefty downtimes. So, it's best to take a balance of big, shiny AoE skills, as well as smaller spells with lower recharges to pick stuff off inbetween. As an example... For a while, I ran
[skill]Teinai's Heat[/skill][skill]Searing Heat[/skill][skill]Fireball[/skill][skill]Smoldering Embers[/skill]
as my damaging spells on my new ele. While, admittedly, not the perfect skill selection, it works well enough - open up with the Heats on clumps of stationary enemies to soften them up, and use Fireball and Embers to pick off the survivors.
Another thing to consider is that higher-level enemies take greatly reduced damage from your spells, inflicting burning on them is an effective way to bypass their armour. [skill]Mark of Rodgort[/skill] and [skill]Immolate[/skill] are effective here.
Hmm... Oh, yes.
[skill]Meteor Shower[/skill] <-- An impressive skill, to be sure, with a particularly noticeable animation. Many PuG eles swear by this skill, and it is, truth be told, an effective skill under the right conditions. Stuff to consider:
1)Stationary clusters of enemies, particularly caster-types - using MS on moving foes means you've just wasted, essentially, a one-shot skill. Wait till aggro settles and the enemy mages are trained in on a target before casting.
2)Time delay is an important thing to consider - MS takes 5 seconds to cast, and it's a further 3 seconds before the 1st meteor hits. That's 8 seconds before the spell actually does anything. For this reason, I, and many others, use [skill]Glyph of Sacrifice[/skill] before casting, reducing the delay to 3 seconds. With a halfway decent PuG, guild group or hench team, in them 8 seconds the enemy would be pretty beat-up and you would've been better off with Rodgort's Invocation.
To be honest, the extra 30 sec recharge tagged on by the glyph isn't a biggie. MS already has 60 sec cooldown, it's a one-shot skill either way. Meteor Shower will have recharged by the time you need it again, and in PvE, morale boosts that instantly recharge skills are easy to come by.
Yeah... that's about all I can think of.
I haven't mention SF, Liquid Flame or any of the other goodies in Nightfall 'cuz... the OP can't get 'em.
My fingers hurt...
regards, Stormlord.
P.S.... Oh... yeah, check out the ele forums here at guru. Ensign knows his stuff
Guildwiki also has a builds section you can pull ideas from (though, even some of the vetted builds there are not all too good... beware!)
