Elementalist Endgame

This has been bothering me a lot lately.

I've been playing a fire elementalist for a while now, and I've heard from many sources that fire is inferior with mobs past level twenty due to armor. I'm wondering, is there any place for a fire elementalist in hard-modes or UW? Would air (armor penetration) or earth (from what I've heard) be better choices? Should I even be a DPS, or should I go heal or something?

Basically, I'm wondering where and endgame elementalist fits in best. I use the term best lightly, because I'm looking for opinions. I know all about that "there is no best" stuff. We can also assume that I primarily run with henchmen and heroes (though I obviously have no intentions of doing that for UW, and not just because I can't bring henchmen there).

My guild has done DoA and FoW HM with 2-3 eles in the party and didn't have much trouble. Also, when vanquishing and other miscellaneous stuff, we usually throw in Searing Flames ele heroes when we don't have any specific needs or better ideas.

From personal experience, even the Air the damage seems a tad inferior compared to armor ignoring stuff that Mesmers and Necros have, but picking your targets so that you damage the max amount of enemies usually offsets that even with fire.

In short, Ele DPS is good enough to get through most endgame areas. Whether it's optimal, no comment.

PS. Don't bother healing if you're Hero/Henching. Bots can't prioritize targets unless there's someone calling attacks.

You would get more answers from the Elementalist section. I will give you my input, by my input is very biased, so be warned.

It's true that most Ele spells are less effective in HM because of increased armor. However, that does not make you useless. For example, Searing Flames @14 would do around 20 less damage to the same foe in HM than in NM. Having the ability to keep foes Burning makes for great armor-ignoring damage (unless immune to Burning). Also toss in Mark of Rodgort, and you have AoE condition and hexing going on, which is great for party members that require conditions or hexes to use their own skills. To that extent, Discordway works great with this.
While Air is nice, it doesn't have spammability or mob power. Chain Lightning and Invoke can only hit 3 foes at most.
Earth is actually pretty nice, as long as foes don't have interrupts, since you will probably get interrupted a lot because the better Earth spells take 2-3 seconds to cast. With Earth, there isn't much to spam since the better spells have long recharges, so energy will likely not be a problem.

For "endgame" areas, Eles may not be the best choice. For generic use, Eles are still great to have.

Fire eles are actually meta in DoASC, enjoy it =)

Ele gets lots of energy from primary attribute. So thats useful and gives quite some options.

Sear Fl still works in HM. Also whats your 2nd profession? Get some armor ignoring dmg (N or Me maybe), PvE skills (EotN), GoLE, ... Attunement maybe ....

Otherwise Ele are "supposedly" the best healers/ prots w/ Ether Renewal?! I tried it on heroes, but never played that build myself.

Also make an other build in case you fight Destroyers (immune to burning + fire resist).

Only because of Weaken Armor (-armor) which makes the HM armor back to NM armor so eles do big damage.

Try taking a Ranger hero with Winter in his/her skill bar in areas where enemies have high fire dmg resistance.
Also, you can make all kinds of variants of solo Earth builds using Mesmer as sec prof. Mantra of Earth (Inspiration) Stoneflesh Aura (Earth) and Stone Striker (Earth) will usually absorb almost all dmg. You can add whatever counters you need and still have room for dmg dealing -usually. This doesn't work in all areas but there are lots it can work in.
Air elementalists have their place but nearly all air skills hit only one target. Water eles make excellent support even mixed with a little air, but they are rarely used as such. They can be deadly in numbers a fire ele can just do so much dmg alone.
Whatever you choose, remember that to truly be effective you must get that attribute up to an optimal level.

If you or someone in your party also brings Cracked Armor a fire ele is still viable in HM.
Air is bad against high armored foes because the base damage decrease faster than the increase of additional damage due to armor penetration.
Pure DPS is bad because the ele wasn't meant for DPS. Always bring at least 1 or 2 support skills like Aegis or Great Dwarf Weapon. Earth is in general the best choice in PvE because it combines good support (blind, knock down) with medicore AoE damage.
Eles had, have and will properly always have a place in PvE endgame, common builds are Terra Tank, Searing Flames DD or recently ER supporter.

I find utility builds to be quite effective for Elementalist in Hard Mode situations. They have plenty of skills that offer things like Weakness, Blind, Cracked Armor, Daze, Blocking, and can even boost armor for themselves and the team through Wards. They also have some excellent hexes to provide various benefits to the team such as making monsters miss with attacks, moving slow, unable to use signets or at least make them use them slowly. There are lots of options other than damage, and the damage is greatly reduced in Hard Mode.

To give an example of how much that damage is reduced I'll tell a short story. My old guild was doing a run through Bogroot Growths using a balanced team. I asked them what they needed, and they said a nuker. So I loaded up my little used Elementalist and met them for it. They said they wanted a fire nuker, so I took Rodgorts Invocation, Immolate, Mind Blast, Fire Attunement, Aura of Restoration, Resurrection Chant, Intensity, and Fireball. As I said, it was a little used character, so I didn't have lots of options for PvE skills. Now, if you know the dungeon you remember the groups of plants. Plants are weak against Fire, so I thought even in HM I'd do respectable damage. Now, Rodgorts Invocation said it should do 127 damage (16 Fire), yet when I used it against the plants I was seeing a meager 58 damage. That is roughly 45% of the damage, meaning I was doing 55% less damage.

So yes, Hard Mode will make elemental damage become significantly less, and even some monsters in Normal Mode will have the increased armor to see the same results.