It was pointless but they could have buffed it and left it as a unique feature. I would love to have the enemies have (Where is the Corpus flame thrower, DE?)
At default it would have 40% or 50% Status Chance and pressing Atl-Fire key would trigger it instantly instead forcing player wasting 1 second switching to Alt-Fire, 1 second jumping backwards and 0,5-1.0 second waiting for animation to give controls back to the player.