The buff to be able to interrupt sawing is nice, it helps, but it doesn’t actually address what makes them unsatisfying to use; That being the awkard wind-up time for the special attack.
The issue
Having to do the rev up animation and then winding up the attack, which is even longer if you need to use a heavy, to only then finally actually hit the enemy. And Emperor help you if a mook happened to get in the way of that swing meant for a rager as all that set up is then wasted.
While all of that only takes a couple seconds, that couple seconds very often leads to most enemies you try to use it against dying long before you actually complete the chain attack. It just takes entirely too long and either ends with the thing dying before you even finish the wind up, or dying during the actual sawing animation to someone else. That just ultimately makes it frustrating to use. It creates the impression that the chain attack is more of a gimmick than an actually useful tool in your kit.
Even without taking teammate damage into account, I can either take all that time to wind up a rev attack on a rager or mauler… or I could hotswap to my sidearm and kill multiple rager/maulers in the time it would take to saw down just one.
My solution to this is a play on the Gears of War perfect-reload system;
Keep everything the same, but add the ability to press the Rev button during a specific part of your attack swing animation that will instantly rev up the chain and perform a chain attack on hit. The timing of the activation doesn’t need to be super precise, it should be something you can comfortably perform reliably and not something you need ultra-reflexes and prefect ping to achieve but still tight enough to need to learn when to press the button.
The advantage would be much more fluid usability of the chain attack that doesn’t require the awkward and clunky stop-start of trying to rev up in combat. Additionally with this system if you hit the wrong target you can just interrupt and try again much more smoothly. The trade-off is if you do get the timing wrong you end up just doing a regular hit that won’t stun the target and can lead to you getting bodied if you were banking on locking down a mauler or rager with your saw.
This would add a new element of skill to using these weapons and eliminate the need to awkwardly interrupt the rhythm of combat to pre-start the saw blade with that canned rev-up animation playing every time you want to use it. It would make chain weapons as a whole operate more fluidly. It also adds a risk/reward aspect as you could still choose to do it the old way, pre-rev first and guarantee your next swing is a chain attack, or you can more fluidly engage without having to stop if you get good enough with the timing to be confident you’ll pull it off.
This to me is the only thing Chain Weapons really need to feel incredibly fun to use as the clunk surrounding their special attack is the most glaring flaw in how they play right now.