That's not ele, that's YOU. If you're dying a lot while leveling as ele then you are the problem. I'm not even sure how you die with a 5 second aoe stun, an aoe knockdown, earth elemental and ancestral shift.
It's not, there are a lot of bad players who refuse to think for themselves. They try to facetank mobs and use a single target lava burst rotation for leveling, which is really stupid.Then they blame the spec for being terrible players.
Do what I said and you'll breeze through content. Pull as many mobs as you want with flame shock and have them all run into a pack. Then it's:
Magma totem - lightning surge - storm keeper + 3x CL - earth quake. You then mop stuff up with lava burst and shocks. Even another EQ if you want.
It's a bit trickier to get casters into the aoe pack, so i generally pull the melee over to the casters and interrupt the farthest to get it to run in.
If you really want to go ham you can throw your elemental totems in. As you get used to doing these pulls you'll be able to time lightning surge and magma so you take very little initial damage. You should be able to stun, magma, storm keeper and get all 3 CLs off just as the stun wears off, then you have EQ down. You'll be at about 50% hp when all is done and off you go to the next pack.
Talent wise you want 3/1/1/2/2/3/3. For level 60 i went swiftness, but echo is also fine. Don't listen to the haters. They tried to level as ele for a couple pulls, failed, then moved on to a braindead option because thinking is just too hard.