Do you have a proper setup for it? Load Shells 2 is pretty much mandatory and replaces Focus 3 from World(you can still use focus but it's honestly kinda shit it feels like). Load Shells let you get 5 phials as soon as the gauge is yellow, instead of red, so you can usually get it with one charged Circle double hit and then another random hit. Very easy to constantly get phials with it. You also want at least Rapid Morph 2, preferably 3 but that depends a bit on your decos/talismans. Past that there's two main builds, the standard discharge build which works on maximizing phial damage as well as to some extent hit damage, and the axe spammy build which is more about normal attacks.
For normal build, you want Artillery 3 and preferably as much attack boost as you can fit, but you still kinda want WEX too so you can crit with your big axe hits. Personally I found Axe Hopper to be a lot better for this build, you can build phials fast enough with the normal attacks, and then when you have an opening you can do Axe Hopper and get big damage in. The advantage is while in the air, you can aim in any direction for your SAED, while if you do it "normally" from axe combos or after a guard point, you're very limited in correcting your angle so if the monster moves you're super fucked. Also when you can't find an opening, charging the sword then doing Triangle Triangle > Triangle+Circle combos is suprisingly high damage since every hit procs a phial and it's very fast, with impact phials you can also KO stuff by doing that in their face.
Axe build I haven't done, but basically you replace the first switch skill for charged sword with the axe one instead, and you charge up the axe, and it's similar to World Iceborne version where you get axe attacks that also pop phials and shit. It's very high sustained dmg, but it's kinda slow and clunky so fast monsters tend to shit on you. One change from world is in that mode, if you use your standard Triangle attacks, you gain phials, while Circle attack expend phials, so you can technically stay in axe mode forever(in Iceborne it was just an alternate way to consume phials). Build is standard stuff(+ load shells and rapid morph, but don't need artillery for this).
I've been doing standard build and while it's not great, if you can get good openings it does pretty ridiculous damage. Axe Hopper is like 200 on initial hit, then 300 on SAED hit with 4 or 5 explosions doing 100 each, so when you land it, it chunks stuff up, but the idea is to not force it that much and instead rely on charged sword combos to whittle down the monster and look for KOs/knockdowns/palico CC to get the big hits in. Sometimes Guard Point > SAED also works out nicely as it's faster so you can make use of it on certain monster move you know have recovery after them but not too long. It's certainly not my favorite weapon but I use it every now and then to change stuff up.
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