Guild Wars 2 Open Beta - Elementalist Earth Attunement

Earth Attunement

  I had high hopes for this attunement.  It became apparent in the open beta that stacking bleeds was a very good way to do a lot of damage over time.  Commonly when getting killed you would review where the source of most of the damage came from, and often Bleeds would be the highest damage incoming.  The earth attunement has some ways to apply bleeds but what I was hoping for with this attunement was some substantial  survivability.  I mean if we loosely equate attunement to profiles, fire would be your sustain damage profile, water would be your control and healing profile, air is your burst profile, and earth should be a survivability profile... but there isn't a whole lot of uniqueness in Earth right now.  If the concept of the Elementalist is going to be a "twisting" mechanic between attunements to maximize the effectiveness, its important that these attunements bring something useful to the table.  At this time I don't see "a complete package" using any given weapon set among all attunements. (of course its just beta).

  This attunement was the biggest pain to level because it seemed like it was the least useful, most confused, and least thought out.  Stacking bleeds is nice, but survivability has to be there for an Elementalist to bleed an opponent to death.  The closest you get to some good defense is scepter/focus, where you get a little armor from Rock Barrier, and an "oh shit" button in Obsidian Flesh.  The real question is, if Earth attunement is going to be the survivability mode (bear form!) then your other attunements have to not be shit when you're using scepter/focus.

Fire = Scepter isn't bad, Focus isn't optimal.
Water = You get a decent slow/stun combo with Focus, but a weak heal and other throw away abilities with Scepter
Air = Lightning strike is an okay nuke from scepter, and gale isn't bad utility

  So overall the options for Scepter/Focus are "meh."

  Dust Devil (earth) and Blinding Flash (Air) are basically duplicates.
Magnetic Wave (earth) and Swirling Wind (Air) are also redundant.
You probably won't be using Gale when you have Freezing Gust/Comet combo.

  Maybe in situations where you need to mitigate a lot of projectile damage and make your opponent miss the next attack it might be a perfect spec... but you're still left with a junk heal in water...but decent damage in fire.

  Overall I'm not seeing the internal consistency in this class yet.  Maybe next beta weekend Elementalist will get a tweak or maybe I'll see more as I'm playing.