Smoke screen practice. Dragons maybe ?

[MNIL]

I noticed many if not all top players use smoke screen. May I presume it makes itself useful in dragons' trials ? I can't make it past trial 70 against dragons so I supposed smoke screen might be the solution. I'm a total newbie ... If that is the case could someone explain how to correctly use it ?

[Skyla]

It's really just a small buff to damage for most. The other uses for it are the aggro drop/ blind effect,.. mostly used in farming or a CC situation to escape death.
Snipe is the main damage spell, other 2 utility spells are usually buffs or well, utilities, so with that said, everything you have needs to focus on buffing that spell.
Stalker set, assassin pistols, high haste to trigger the 6 piece stalker bonus more often, ***utilizing the "gather and snipe " routine and increasing it's uses by having 3 healers(for vortex spell), the molten belt, osmosis head enchant,(eventually slayer enchant), high ability rate as well as haste are all major factors in getting in the higher levels.
Addressing your problems with "the dragons "... join the club if it's Garm, everyone hates that fight, and TBD shouldn't be giving you trouble(as long as you stay out of the red circles on the ground and avoid getting hit by the "knock-back burst") as a hunter. I'm sure there's plenty of threads on the forum addressing proper boss fight techniques though.

***This routine is just gathering as many enemies as you can and then "vortexing" them into a small group,.. then immediately casting snipe at the group. You end up destroying many more enemies at a lot higher rate this way.
Hope that helps a little.

[MNIL]

Skyla, thanks for your time and consideration. I guess snipe works "as intended" only by using assassin's pistols and crit damage, as a bundle, otherwise heatseekers do 6x25000 dmg which is the way I've choosed at the moment as my assassin pistol are too weak and I'm using fire lily instead of crits. My plus 50% heatseekers damage special ordnance belt helps too. Also note you don't need vortex this way as HS find their targets as far as you're just roughly surrounded by the mob. If you please, let me think your opinion about it. As for the Smoke screen I understand its purpose now and I don't quite find it useful at the moment.

[Skyla]

I see, you're going the Havoc route, very viable setup, it will likely be your go to for a while. I would look towards incorporating the new Demo set eventually, will work well with your style. And you're correct in thinking smoke screen and even snipe are not so useful for your setup. I would check LBs for someone setup with demo, or demo/ havoc and setup similar to them.
You'll want igniter pistols, tracer ammo, explosive shot, there are a few more that increase missile and explosive damage, havoc head piece and hands have an extra gear buff as well that helps your build also.
You may find that the fire lily will hinder your trial level at a certain point. There's still lots of testing to do with fire lily builds so that's definitely an x factor. It's great at low levels but there's theory that it's not so great for higher levels.

[Skyla]

Vortex and magnetic traps will do one of the two important things for passing trials, kill the mobs faster, by gathering 4 separate groups (for example the groups are setup in north, south, east and west) into one group with vortex or magtrap and then casting HS, you'll kill them faster. Your HS will track the enemy regardless, but they won't be able to kill all 4 groups without gathering first, vortex let's you kill them faster that's all. MagTrap is a good replacement for vortex if you like using archers or just don't wanna pay 500gems for a companion.
The second part to trials is killing the boss faster. The molten belt, osmosis enchant and the extra tracer ammo stacks from igniters and havoc head pce help with this.
And really fire lily will hinder this. Even without using stalker set, snipe can be highly beneficial in the boss fight, coupled with talisman of storms you become knife through butter. So think about ditching the lily for a bit and trying a few of those things, might help.

[Ubba Lothbrokson]

Even with heat-seekers, Vortex helps, as you can gather several dozen bad guys into a clump and nail them all together. 12 missiles might not take out that many at once if they are all spread out.

I typically run my Havoc BH with a Maggie to replace Marcus. I don't do a third as I find the "M" gesture too hard to reliably do in the heat of combat. So I keep Robin for the slight Haste boost.