Review – SteelSeries WoW MMO Gaming Mouse Legendary Edition

Packaging

Unboxing this mouse is fun – the box cover gives a mystic photo preview of the device inside, creating a very clean, simple box. The magnetic cover opens with a satisfying tug to reveal dark grey maps and character art, with the lightning-emblazoned treasure nestled as if it is a recovered artifact.
Without the lighting effects functioning, the mouse is much less dramatic, so it makes sense to display it in all its grandeur on the cover for a first impression. Unpacking was easy and the quality of the build is immediately apparent when handling this mouse. It has extremely solid construction – no piece of it feels as though it was tacked on out of necessity rather than ergonomics.

Build

In fact, the feel of this mouse makes me think of wine. Every wine connoisseur talks about ‘mouth-feel’ – how pleasant, natural, smooth a wine’s initial impression creates. SteelSeries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse: Legendary Edition instantly evokes a very pleasant “mouse-feel”. The structure of the mouse actually fits each finger quite comfortably, unlike many smaller, sleeker mice. The slightly rubberized feel prevents my hand from slipping, while the buttons themselves are hard plastic, allowing me to quickly slide from button to button.

I have never handled a programmable mouse with buttons so perfectly suited to my hand. Within extremely easy reach are all four buttons at the thumb. They are raised gradually from the center point to little peaks at the end of the buttons, making it easy to identify by feel exactly which button my thumb is about to press. On the right side, the little button is very easy to reach if all five fingers are on the mouse (meaning the pinky rests on the button) but a little more difficult with the ring finger.

On the top, two buttons straddle the mouse wheel/button, along with a fourth just behind it. Again, in my experience, these buttons are very well distinguished from one another, making it actually useful to add separate functions for use in game.

The mouse wheel, for me, is perfect: it feels rugged with its very deep, diamond-shaped grooves and a firm resistance.

User Experience

Once I actually began using this mouse, the tradeoff between this robust, hand-filling mouse and sleeker, smaller devices became clear. This mouse was designed with input from pro gaming teams SK Gaming, Fnatic, Evil Geniuses, and Paragon, and I have increasingly noticed mice getting bulkier to the point of including weights for full customization. For me, it makes the motion of the device itself feel inevitably sluggish. I believe this relatively slow physical motion enhances digital precision for those who need perfect fraction-of-a-second actions, so expert is their gaming. I am a decidedly more casual gamer and struggle with the tradeoff between light-as-a-feather skating around and a much more ‘grippy’ feel between the mouse and my desk.

Once I installed the software, through http://steelseries.com/downloads/, configuration was quick and easy. The buttons are listed in numerical order grouped by location on the mouse, and they are enumerated on an easy to read graphic below. Speed and precision settings expand to the left, button assignments to the right, and illumination settings at the bottom.

The counts per inch double precisely from 400-3200, but the double click, scroll and win-pointer speed are increased by clicking or dragging from one end of a bar to another – my preference is to see numeric values, even if they are relative, and be able to increment them by clicking an arrow or ‘plus’. But hey, it works. The Advanced Sensitivity is similar, increasing along an X and Y axis from 1 to 10, but again it is clicked or dragged without the ability to increment one step at a time. These settings are totally functional and easy, but perhaps not as pleasant as the illusion of selecting a particular value.

Button Assignments use a simple, terrific drag-and-drop system, with the actions listed in collapsible categories that can simply be dropped onto a button and applied – really slick. If ‘in-game’ mode is selected,

10 profiles are displayed along the top as big easily accessible buttons and the option to switch to a particular profile or scroll through them is one of the drag-and-drop functions easily programmed onto one of the 11 buttons.

I loved adjusting this mouse for WoW play. While in WoW, there is an option to “Detect World of Warcraft Gaming Mouse” that, when selected, allows a host of common WoW actions to be simply dragged onto the appropriate mouse button and applied. This includes the ability to map a ton of action buttons as well as custom macros. It feels easy and intuitive.

Additionally, there is a wonderful little touch that makes WoW integration really feel complete: as long as your character is listed at wowarmory.com, it can be linked to a profile for quick reference. The photo pops up so if you’re visually driven like me, it’s convenient and personalized to remember what’s what.

Style

This mouse, to my eye, appears bulky because of what seems to be an extra layer for the lightning graphics, a perception magnified by the fact that the glowing World of Warcraft logo is set substantially lower than the rest of the outside shell. To my eyes it would have looked cleaner and more integrated to raise the logo or to lower the outside casing so that visually it could be a single element.

The illumination of the mouse is a fun and frustrating little exercise. I like to customize like mad, so one of the first things I did was try to find just the perfect color to pulse and glow while being covered up by the palm of my hand. The box indicates that there are 16.8 million color options to illuminate the WoW logo with, but try as I might (and I really gave it a go) I couldn’t find more than about a dozen colors in spite of clicking on countless pixels within their color map. With some rather nuanced colors displayed in the Illumination Settings menu, the colors displayed on the mouse would often stay the same or switch to an adjacent color.

The last note on this subject: much as I wanted to change the color from the default bright yellow-orange, virtually everything else clashed with the lightning on the body of the mouse – it just felt a bit ‘beta’ to me, since every time I fiddled with it all I could think of was what I would change. I would really love to see a logo at the same height as the rest of the graphics where the lightning matched the selected color, perhaps through clear fissures in the otherwise opaque casing.