Why does Wraith Flash have onboard weapons?

It's incredibly cheap.
https://gfycat.com/EsteemedAbsoluteDunlin
This is in addition to their ability to roadkill while remaining invisible.
What gives?

He's got the master pistol banner unlocked at level 84

hahhahhahhaha i was playing with pewpew earlier tonight and he was laughing and having a blast with his flash while we maggyd about cleaning up after us

wraith flash = love

as if a giant clear blob and a loud engine coming up to you isnt a big enough hint. they really arent hard to see, especially if you become aware of their presence before hand via dying teammates

Been saying this from day one. Fury wraith flash is one of the cheesiest thing in the entire game and doesn't serve any purpose other than to farm infantry, when originally it was supposed to provide infiltrators with a quick way to a good sniping position or behind enemy lines.

man when you take out a fully staffed harasser with one though..

swoon

Oh yeah, so easy:



And even if you could hear the flash engine over the sound of gunfire and explosions and other engines, what would you have me do about it? There's no radar signature, the thing is completely invisible, and it's got a OHK weapon. There was literally nothing I could have done to counter him.

could have had mines down..

mostly you got screwed by the hill blocking his approach, also, smart wraith flash drivers look for fights where the sound will be drowned out and the enemy are distracted, its like, infiltrator 101

i love doing wraith flash and can tell you people can and will see you a lot

All the arguments made for wraith flash could also be made for infiltrators with shotguns. "You got shotgunned by an invisible infiltrator? Well, should have had AI mines down." Really?
But luckily, the devs took shotguns away from infiltrators, because having an invisible thing that could OHK you was bad for the game. Wraith flash is faster, harder to see, can stay cloaked longer, and has more powerful weapons. It makes no sense.

One of the most fun things in this game for me, killing an MBT or launching a scree scree max from a hill is just so satisfactory and all those ragetells... i can almost taste the tears.

why don't try the flash out before making complains about it it's really harder than you think
yes sure if you did not see them and get OHK by it it looks to be overpowered
but the time and strategy needed to get to the right place as a flash driver is totally forgotten

only the dedicated drivers become good enough to not die within 2 minutes
you can compare them to ESF air kings only the best can stay long enough in the air
same thing to those flash drivers

i am a average flash driver and my kills come most of the time from players with tunnel vision not aware from there surroundings
the moment there are some top players looking out for me i am death cause the flash is so easy to see/hear

I think that the Flash should get a variable module on it so that every single class gets it's own advantage while driving the Flash.

It's also hard to play infiltrator well, especially once some top players start looking out for you, since infil cloak is even easier to see and cloaking makes such a loud, distinctive, faction-specific sound. Should we give them shotguns too?
Whether or not it's "hard" is beside the point. I'm saying it's cheap because, when done correctly, the target cannot counter. Can you refute that?

Although the video was funny as hell...

Yes, I do agree that wraith flashes were a mistake.

well my NC alt has a pocket shotgun nobody complaining about that
i use it to 2 shot HA with looks like OHK on there screen cause it kills so fast
and yes the infill can use a sound reduction
i say yes give all infills a shotgun if they don't reduce the sound

for the flash it's not cheap it has a real counter it's called awareness of your surroundings
like you need to be aware for infills
they are easy enough to shoot down from there flash i even knife them sometimes
i guarantee you if a flash kills me once they will not do it twice in the same area or it's my own fold

I'm talking about real shotguns (and even the most powerful infantry shotguns are weak compared to the Renegade.) And there's a reason why the Mag-scatter sucks so hard. The devs literally said it themselves: it's because of infiltrators being able to carry it.

So you're saying I should have shot or knifed the guy in the 0.2 seconds it took him to decloak and OHK me from 15m away?
I see.

I think that flash could have been countered if the "target" would have walked instead of running and had a dumb-fire launcher in his hands.
Even a passing Reaver with AH can be countered like that with a combination of awareness/skill/luck.
Also a jump to the right could have saved Mr. Maggoo.
But there are also many really "uncounterable" ways to die for the heavy in that clip.
Like a tank-shell from render distance, a skilled sniper from anywhere, a LA with pump gun jumping from the top or any bigger vehicle comming round the corner.
"When done correctly, the target can(almost)not counter"... that's PS2! If you are a dedicated wraith-flash player (or tanker or pilot or sniper or whatever) there should be a reward. And there is one! But still: Even the best players die in this game.
I like that.

no i am saying if you get killed twice by the same flash it's your own fold
getting killed once by a flash happens to everyone

All flashes sound the same though - so if you have friendly ones in the area, you may not clock that it is an enemy one.

Perhaps the engine sounds of NS vehicles could be modified based on which faction has pulled them (much like the cloaking sound is) - so at least you can tell what faction is lurking nearby. We have ES specific cosmetics now - so it wouldn't be a big stretch to imagine that the individual empires mod the engines/exhausts on their vehicles to give them a distinctive sound.

That's a bit of a double-edged knife

Screen size have a massive effect on the visibility of Infiltrators. My brother has a larger screen than me, and while making a video we discovered that stealthed units on my screen were much less visible, even when we knew where they were, than on his. On his screen we could see stealthed units at more than 3x the range with ease.

Sound also has a massive impact. With the right sound settings (not sure personally what those are) you can make some sounds much louder. Sounds like footsteps and vehicle movement. Having the right hardware support is also important here. My new headphones are miles and miles better than any of the sound boxes I used previously. Now I can pinpoint the location of enemies with much higher accuracy than ever before.

So your remark of "just beware of your surroundings" could very well be true for you, but not for the OP. No one should be this reliant on hardware to be able to counter something this small, fast, stealthy and heavily armed. In the case of the GIF I would actually say that the Flash used the surroundings for an advantage to get his kill. But in general there's nothing wrong with adding new things to make Wraith Flashes more easily countered.
Counters could include anything from making yourself harder to hit to weapons that can reliably locate Wraith Flashes or warn you in time somehow.