Steelseries WoW Mouse

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General Windows Usage

While it’s not as comfortable as the Roccat Kone mouse we reviewed recently, it is of similar size, giving the impression – to me at least – that this is quite a relaxed gaming mouse. Therefore general windows usage is something it does very well indeed. It’s high DPI allows transitioning across my dual 24″ TFTs (I win) very quickly, and it’s high polling rate meant there was no jumping around at all. Scrolling is the smoothest I’ve ever had it on any mouse to date, and even though the left and right mouse buttons are large, they allow you to click them from quite far back; meaning my small hands were just as capable of using this as some giant’s big mitts.

Call of Duty World at War

While Veteran difficulty is reasonably hard on the Single Player game, you know the real challenge lies online against real people; and although some of them are 13 year olds, the majority are a lot smarter than the grenade spamming AI. So, taking hold of my WoW Gaming mouse, I jumped online and began gunning down Nazis, and after switching teams, yelling “Fur Die Fuhrer!” down my mic.

Because of the rather bulky size of the WoW mouse, I was expecting it to be a bit difficult to perform quick, accurate shots. I was surprised however, when I was able to keep level with my usual playing standard. That said, I still think a smaller mouse that fits my hand slightly better makes it easier for me to perform my quick killing, but the WoW mouse was still very effective as my tool of death.

As far as the extra buttons go, I did spent some time reloading and throwing grenades from the mouse. The former wasn’t bad, but no faster than using the keyboard, and the latter would often make me miss my target as pressing the button would send my aim off slightly.

Peggle

Peggle is a nice slow paced game, that requires pin point accuracy; one twitch of the hand and your shot; is shot to sSteelseries WoW Mouse. Here the WoW mouse did very well indeed, I could use the beautifully smooth scroll wheel to finely tune each shot, and had no problems with it jumping away from where I aimed it. Unlike WoW and Call of Duty, this game really has no need for the mappable buttons,

World of Warcraft

This is the game where this mouse should really shine, this is what it was designed for; hell it’s called the Steelseries WoW Mouse. The initial button setup for it is this:

Click to enlarge

Trusting Steelseries to provide me with a nice default button layout, I jumped into the game and setting up my new Tauran Hunter named “Testor” I ran around the bluff, slaying lions, and bristlebacks and over time I started to use more of the additional buttons. As with the other titles, it does feel very weird having my thumb constantly over a button; or several buttons as it were. The ability to quickly hit “autorun” though was rather usefull, and you can also run manually by holding down the central button.

The map and character keys were a little awkward to use, but their use is quite rare – especially when you have a large res. monitor, you probably keep the character window open anyway. I didn’t really find the “Target Next hostile” and “stop all” buttons very useful, mainly because I’d rather have a manual control over the former, and the latter is easily done just by running in any direction or turning around.

Assist target and focus were a little odd, and the dismount button is almost a tease for those of us who haven’t made it to level 30 yet. Toggle battle map on the other hand is pretty useful, but once again, this is something you’ll press once when you first start the game, and most likely leave running until you quit. Why do I need a quick toggle button for this?

So, into the software I went to make some changes. As we’ve seen, the changes you can make are pretty comprehensive, so I made a few to see if I could make the multitude of buttons on this mouse more useful.

I setup a rest key to give myself a quick way of gaining health and mana back instead of typing “/sit”. I also threw in a few chat commands I liked to use , adding those to the buttons I hadn’t used before. After tim
, I managed to turn the mouse into something that was geared exactly to my playing experience, giving me all the commands I need on one hand, meaning I don’t even need to touch the keyboard for quick shortcuts. As soon as I noticed myself using the keyboard, I added the command to a free button on the mouse.

If you really went to town on this, you could add a profile switching button and having different profiles geared up to different situations that you might need certain button combos in. You might even like to add certain DPI values and Polling rates if you wish.

Comfort & Functionality

The WoW mouse is an interesting one, as it’s got an odd shape, and more buttons than most game pads! It’s reasonably comfortable, and it’s nice to have somewhere to put your ring and little fingers. That said, your thumb is constantly sat on the D-Pad style buttons, which is a little odd when you aren’t playing a game that isn’t Warcraft, and ones that don’t require macros. Also, you run the risk of slipping and pressing buttons that you’ve setup for WoW and infact do something completely different in the game you’re playing. Not only that, but it almost requires you to take a less firm grip of the mouse because you don’t want to accidentally press the buttons. This isn’t necessarily a negative, but those that like to really squeeze their little rodent, might run into problems here. That said, you can bypass the worry by switching profiles to one that has no buttons mapped, when you play something other than Warcraft.

With that said, the plastic and other materials used on the mouse work very well and are indeed, very comfortable. You can reach all the buttons quite easily even with small hands like mine. The scroll wheel also happens to be the most comfortable and smoothly operated that I’ve ever used.

NB. Something that must be noted, is that when I first received the mouse the left button kept sticking down making it impossible to use. However, using a screwdriver I popped the button off, and after reattaching it was fine. If you buy one of these and encounter this problem, at least you know how to fix it now.

Cost

Wow… and no I didn’t capitalise that incorrectly, I mean wow. This mouse will set you back, a whopping £70. Holy jesus, this must be the most expensive mouse I have ever heard of. This is £15 more than the Roccat Kone and at least £20 more than Razer’s top offering.

Peripherals