Why's fire considered the "worst" element?

I'm trying to figure out what I want to do as a build for hardcore witch, and I see most people saying that Ice and Lightning are on par, but Fire is the worst.

But on these forums you can see a few people making fire builds, like this one http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/77067 by VoidMoon, which seems to do OK according to the gameplay video he linked in the thread.

So why is fire considered crappy, and why is it working for them?

Voidmoon actually switched to lightning. Fire isn't bad, the burn effect is nice, but compared to the CC from cold and the shock stacks from lightning it does have less utility. Especially notable in HC.

Fire is not crappy or non-viable at all.

The judging comes from the elemental status alignments. Freezing brings safety, Lightning brings the biggest dmg boost and Burning is, well, nice.

Nothing wrong with it, but it's also mostly not rocking one's world.

What exactly does Burning do, just a DoT?

140% damage as dot I believe.

When the mob burns, it has a chance to flee to. It's kinda luckluster and very often annoying. I'm running double firestorm totem + fire traps- when I was surrounded by 30+ monkeys in the forest, half of them were running for their lives burning. Very funny mechanic. But when you want to focus fire this bitches, it's annoying as hell, because they keep moving constantly.

Dot is 33% of the crit/hit that procced it per second for 4 seconds. So an additional 4/3 of the damage that procced it. Sadly fire is lacking in single target heavy damage spells for proccing it.

Other thing is that fire has only two magic skills compared to six lightning ones and eight cold.

"

Hoverdog wrote:

Other thing is that fire has only two magic skills compared to six lightning ones and eight cold.

Fireball, firestorm, fire trap, molten shell, flame totem and righteous fire.

Fire is bad for 3 reasons:

Freezing pulse
Double Spork totems
Double Ice spear totems