Threw a smoke grenade, as instructed
Yeah you were given bad information by a tard. Smokes do not work on arc. Photo cloaks do, with other arc like bastions and wasps getting attracted to sound like nearby shots. I think rocketeers are too high up to hear shots.
That rocketeer is pretty much always there next to testing annex. You really do just need to avoid it. I understand the frustration as my friends and I have been fucked over by them many times, but that's just how it is. It's the deadliest arc, and I would say a decent challenge.
The retarded part is that the best way to kill them used to be finding a wolfpack blueprint, then crafting it with explosive compound and motion cores. It deals enough damage to take the rocketeer low, and a second one kills it. However the patch made the crafting recipe take...... rocketeer drivers.
This is stupid because the devs constantly talk about the data. The data is why they don't buff the Bettina, even though it's shit. They find that it performs the best of all pve weapons (never mind the ammo economy and other issues). So when they added aggression based matchmaking, they arbitrarily split the playerbase between normal people who will shoot players depending on the circumstances, and friendly chunguses who literally never do. So in the pve lobbies, the only thing they killed was arc. And when everyone is teaming up to kill arc, of course arc are not really a big threat.
So they buffed arc by nerfing various grenades. Wolfpack takes rocketeer drivers, and trailblazer takes firefly ones. Despite.... the fact that they literally just nerfed trailblazers a week ago, which used to be the best method for killing leapers and bastions/bombardiers.
The devs are Swedish. They are retarded. I enjoy most of the game, but ABMM has been a fucking disaster because it's a bedrock mechanic from which all these problems and more, stem.
edit: They could have increased the rocketeer aggro range in the latest patch or something. I haven't played much since I have an endgame account and I'm about to wipe.