Ink Mines are a bit more difficult to use than you'd expect because they explode on their own after around 10 seconds. You can't just lay one and forget about it - if you want to booby-trap a passage, you have to keep tending to it. Splat Zones is probably the best mode for that. I've also seen plenty of players use it as insurance in a close-quarters confrontation, an attempt to take the opponent with them should they die. The top of Blackbelly's center pillar and the moving tower in Tower Control are common places where I've seen that. However, the mine's long detonation time is a glaring weakness that prevents any of these strategies from working reliably. Even when considering natural Internet latency, players can easily react to a mine about to go off and either swim past it or retreat. The fact that it explodes when covered in enemy ink, which opponents need to do anyway to move around, means they'll also be able to react to it when they're already outside its blast radius.
From what I remember, Inkzooka's horizontal range is about as long as the Splatterscope, though nailing high targets at that range is difficult because of how the tornadoes sink (I can't give an exact numerical rate or anything, but you can get a feel for it in the firing range). It doesn't go through obstacles at all, but the part above the top of said obstacle doesn't get deleted and will continue as usual, which means players can hide behind blocks and the like to protect themselves but must stay close to them. However, the sheer speed of the whole thing is what makes it so good. You can literally fill up the special meter, activate it, let loose a tornado (hold down the fire button while pressing the R stick to buffer a shot at the start), and kill whoever's sitting across the map thinking they're out of range, all before they can even react. It's basically like a Kraken (pre-nerf) in terms of how much opponents have to respect it when it's active, except it's even better than that because of its range and speed. People aren't joking when they argue it's one of the best specials in the game, if not the best.
You can jump over Seekers - if you're still dying, that's probably a bit of latency working against you, so jump a bit earlier, and preferably to the side. Or as Tamashii suggested, hide in your own ink to prevent it from locking onto you. Like Ink Mines, Seekers are also relatively easy to react to because of the blaring noises they make. Just be aware of people who might launch them over the tops of ramps (i.e., Urchin and Arowana) or from behind corners when they know you're trying to approach (just stay back in that case). Their grounded nature can also work heavily against them. I was playing a game of Splat Zones on Arowana a week or two ago where the other team had two Seeker users. They gained control of the hill early and started alternating Seekers down the main ramp to form a sort of wall (which I still died to twice lol). But my team still won because we were able to approach from the sides, where the Seekers couldn't reach us, and break their defenses. I admit I'm curious to see how many people will take advantage of Seeker Bomb Rush like this once the Carbon Roller Deco comes out.
