I’m wonder whether Hardcore players are using a build with poison trap and the Heart of trickery to lure mobs into the trap. The shadow clone’s taunt can also be helpful for drawing fire away from you, reducing danger. I have used a build with this, death trap and rapid fire to take a rogue to 74 and WT4, and hopefully further.
try it w/ penetrating shot… 
Yes it works and trap builds are super fun.
I only have 2 issues.
First, the aspect that allows you to lay down 4 traps while in concealment requires concealment, which itself proc a the shadow clone. This is actually annoying because I usually conceal from afar, and move into the mobs in stealth. The interaction therefore forces me to lay traps around where I initially used concealment. This takes some getting-used-to.
Secondly, and although trap builds are SUPER fun, the set-up time and effort will always get overshadowed by TB’s fluidity - because all the time you are spending on laying traps, waiting for mobs, killing mobs inside the trap, an equivalent TB rogue would just be running through them with the returning blades, slaughtering everything.
I am curious about the Twisting Blades build. Is the best one Wujido’s on maxroll.gg or are there some tweaks to it for Hardcore?
Agree with the points above and I play a variant build without the four trap aspect. Instead, it uses poison imbuement, and the play style is to run in drop one poison trap and a death trap, run out and rapid fire.
Wudijo’s build is probably a base benchmark you could use. You will need to tweak it slightly based on your available gear and specific circumstances.
The reality is that all TB builds are really strong and it doesn’t really matter which variant you go - what is more important is to be familiar with the play style and game play.
It took me a long time to get used to it, and I’m going to say that I really hated it at first.
I used Heart of Trickery my whole trip from level 10 to level 100. Its super handy!
Used it with Poison Trap and Smoke Grenades, basically allowing me to use it every 10 seconds.