SteelSeries has been a respected name in gaming peripherals for years, and have recently launched a World of Warcraft-specific “Legendary Edition” gaming mouse as well as some special artwork for their QcK gaming surfaces. They sent along the mouse and a Worgen-themed QcK for us to test out.
Look at that swank box!
The Boxes
First and foremost, manufacturers, we need to have a talk about your packaging. Please copy SteelSeries. When I compare the unboxing experience of these to, let’s say, a cheap Belkin mousepad and a very expensive Logitech Performance MX, SteelSeries takes the crown without breaking a sweat.
The QcK surface comes in a clamshell with a cardboard sleeve, using tape and clever construction to keep it in place. Time required to open it: 30 seconds. Tools required to open it: none. This is how everything should be delivered—easy to open and free of aggravation. Sure, other manufacturers roll it up and toss it in a box, which is fine, as long as you’re not showing off artwork. The QcK, however, is showing off beautiful artwork and thus requires a worthy package.
The Legendary Series mouse comes in one of the smallest boxes I’ve ever gotten a mouse in—and I used to be a fan of the Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box. This made me scratch my head; how is it such a tiny box could hold such a mouse? Does not compute! The answer is wonderfully simple—they just didn’t waste any space. Flip open the cover, and there’s the mouse under plastic. Open the box, pull up the top flap marked “Steelseries,” and out comes the mouse and documentation packet. One careful tug had the mouse free of its plastic home, including the cord. Total time spent from opening to being able to connect the mouse? Less than 30 seconds. Worried such a tiny box doesn’t adequately protect the mouse? Don’t be—my cat jumped on the empty box and sat there. It did not bend at all.
First Impressions
Let’s start with the QcK. Even though I’m proudly Horde, they sent over the Worgen pad (medium size) along with the Legendary Series mouse. When you get an “art” pad, typically you expect pretty average quality—not bad from three feet, but pretty rough up close. In short, that is anything but the case with the QcK. The art quality and printing quality are like nothing I have seen on an art pad before. It looks fantastic from three feet, and it looks fantastic from three inches. The tiniest detail of the source painting has been reproduced with stunning accuracy. It is the most beautiful printing I have ever seen on a mouse pad.
The World of Warcraft Legendary Series mouse itself makes one hell of a first impression. It looks small, but you find out instantly that it packs a good bit of heft to it. This is not something you will be able to fling around accidentally. The sensor area underneath is positively massive, as are the feet of the mouse. The top is brightly polished plastic, and the printing detail is easily comparable to the QcK, making them an amazing pair together. Once you connect it, the lighted area springs to life–it’s bright, but not blinding. It makes its presence known without being overpowering or overwhelming. When you turn off pulsation in the software, it becomes a beautifully understated accent piece to a very stylish piece of hardware.
Is it Style or Is It Function?
Easily my favorite part of the Legendary Series is that it provides a good blending of style with function. You might notice the diamond shaped cutouts on the scroll wheel. Style? Nope. Function. They noticeably improve not only grip while clicking (to prevent accidental scrolling), but also provide another layer of tactile feedback along with the positive feedback scroll wheel assembly. You know exactly how far you’re scrolling at any given time.
The same can be said of the hard plastic covering. Rather than producing reduced functionality or making things harder, it actually makes things much, much better. Clicking is a function of both covering and switch, and this covering makes click action heavier than you might expect. Exactly the kind of heaviness that keeps you from accidentally right clicking that add when you’re tanking Rhyolith. It takes some getting used to as compared to mice with lighter actions, especially if you use right click to mouse turn, but it’s surprisingly pleasant.
What about that odd shape and the light? Both of these are function, as surprising as that might sound. Especially from me, Mister “Death To Blue LEDs In Everything and Lighted Cases!” Most of the time you use the mouse, you won’t see that lighting. The shape is shockingly ergonomic—shockingly because even my rather long fingers find a comfortable home and a very natural grip. This doesn’t happen very often with mice sized for average people. Even the Logitech Performance MX, which is a large and long mouse by most measures, barely fits me. But the SteelSeries Legendary Edition just fits perfectly.
Small details like the notched scroll wheel add up to a great experience
It lends itself better to a claw grip rather than a palm grip, generally. But if you’re a palm grip like I am, it still works well. Your fingers curve comfortably, the right side button has just the right amount of force for clicking with your pinky finger, while the main buttons require significantly more force. The texture differences make it easy to tell exactly where your fingers are at every moment, and the layout of the left side buttons make it almost impossible to hit the wrong one.
The light has proven functional, in no small part because it can display up to 16.7 million colors. Do you care that it can display 16.7 million colors? Honestly, not really. What you care about is that those colors can be associated with a profile, along with whether or not the light pulses and the brightness. You have up to ten profiles (huh, and ten character slots, imagine that…) with the included software. I set up multiple profiles, and associated unique colors with each. Rather than have to alt-tab out and mess with the software, a quick glance at the mouse told me whether or not I was on the right profile, and which it was.
A staggering amount of detail in the artwork, and it all lights up.
This is where I did run into some issues, albeit minor. One was an intermittent bug in the software where the illumination settings were not staying put. They would change all of the illumination settings to the last used profile, and sometimes the illumination settings wouldn’t load to the mouse. As far as anyone can tell, it’s something specific to my system though, so chances are you won’t run into it. The other issue might be more significant for some folks; the “in-game mode” setting is an all or nothing one. It applies to all profiles when selected or unselected and can’t be set per profile. When you enable in-game mode, you cannot adjust buttons in the software, including Windows buttons. The defaults are pretty reasonable, but it is a minor nitpick of mine.
So it’s a World of Warcraft mouse. I don’t play WoW.
Come on guys. This is Icrontic —we’re going to use this for unintended purposes and quite possibly void some warranties along the way (although I’ve avoided voiding the warranty on this one so far). So what, praytell, is a good test of the mouse in a non-Warcraft environment? How about some Team Fortress 2? Yeah, I figured you might be interested in how it works for that.
The super short version is this: WOW. No, seriously. WOW. If you don’t think hardware makes a difference, think again. I main Engineer in TF2, so you’d think “oh boy, you build sentries.” I also run around like a maniac with my Frontier Justice and pistol after I build those sentries. I made a point to do so while testing this mouse. The end result? I started racking up pistol kills. A lot of pistol kills. That honestly, I have not been able to pull off on either a Logitech Performance MX or an old Razer Barracuda 3G.
Is this just a WoW mouse? Absolutely not. This is a downright phenomenal mouse for any game. The tracking is incredibly precise and accurate almost to a fault. To call this mouse imbalancing would be akin to calling water wet. If you don’t think that hardware like the mouse can make a huge difference in your game, allow this to serve as the rebuttal. My kill-death ratio improved dramatically on all classes in TF2. Some creative mapping made me a monster in Natural Selection 2. I was no longer accidentally bulldozing the scenery in Cities in Motion.
This mouse does make a difference no matter what you’re playing. And again, thanks to the custom macro ability, you can set up profiles for just about any game. (And under Profile -> Edit Game / App you can have it autoselect a profile based on the game.)
Okay, it’s a good all around mouse. What about in World of Warcraft?
Detail in the buttons
First, let’s do some background. I’ve been playing WoW a very long time. My main is an Enhancement Shaman, and I also currently raid as a Death Knight doing both main tanking and DPS. I also raid on two additional characters currently in T11, just for fun. Plus I have a smattering of alts here and there. I’m a keyboard and mouse player, meaning, I move and attack with the keyboard primarily and rely on the mouse for camera rotation and select actions.
Judging performance here though, has proven harder. You’d think it’d be easier, but for players who are already doing great, it’s not so easy to differentiate. Sure, there’s log parsing and what have you, but you’re also dealing with a fairly wide range of difference that also depends on 9 or 24 other people. I can tell you that for example, I saw no difference in damage taken (otherwise known as ‘not standing in the fire’) on Shannox with this mouse. I only saw a 1% DPS increase as well, but we took 20 seconds longer. But I also saw a 10% increase in damage taken on Heroic Lord Rhyolith between two mice, due to the randomness of adds and the tank. You kind of get the idea; it’s not necessarily going to completely change your world if you’re already doing fine.
That said, let’s talk about the other aspects that are going to affect you positively and negatively in World of Warcraft. First and foremost, the highly accurate tracking of the mouse alone is worth it, especially if you click your attacks. Second, let’s say you’re an arcane mage. Your rotation is how many buttons again? Don’t you give me that look—we both know it’s true. You can quite literally map your entire set of primaries to this mouse, and have buttons left over. Is this good for you? That’s not something I can answer—it’s entirely up to you. But it is available to you.
The integration with World of Warcraft is also, to put it mildly, incredible. The mouse can operate in either Windows mode or you can check the box marked “Enable in-game mode.” When the mouse is set to “in-game,” you can configure and map your buttons directly within World of Warcraft. There’s no fancy interface, because it’s simply not needed. Just bind directly through key bindings. When operating in Windows mode, an easy to understand ‘Button Assignment’ pop-out is available with an excessively comprehensive but very well organized list of every game command available. Even when not set to “in-game,” buttons with “no assignment” work as if it were set to “in-game” mode.
I found I prefer Button Assignments in Windows mode and different profiles for each character. Speaking of which, the software has Armory integration. I was able to associate each profile to each character simply by clicking the picture, entering realm and character name, and that’s it. The software checks Armory and loads the picture of your character and the current level.
But there is one downside to using the Windows mode that you’ll inevitably run into though. If you use custom keybindings in the game, these may not work as expected. They are mapped to the default keybindings. So when I thought I had mapped strafe left, it was in fact, turn left, as I swap those keybindings. This resulted in some confusion on my part before I realized exactly what was going on. It also doesn’t work so well if you use multiple action bars in a configuration that dates back to Burning Crusade. In other words: for maximum effectiveness, you will need to do a major revamp of your UI and keybindings either way.
And let’s talk about polling rate. Your typical tolerance in World of Warcraft is around 400ms; that means that you can cast something 400ms before your cooldown is actually up. That means that you have a bit of an ugly mismatch at say, a 500Hz polling rate. Because of the way USB works, if you’re clicking two buttons at once (holding right to turn and using an action button) that can actually require two cycles on USB. SteelSeries solves this two ways. One, the Legendary Edition has a polling rate of 1000Hz—the fastest USB 2.0 can go. Second, they don’t simply trust Windows’ built in drivers—it has a proper driver, WHQL signed and all, that coordinates with the software to set the correct polling rate and enforce it. Most “1000Hz” devices I’ve worked with will request it, but permit Windows to change it. That is not the case here.
So what’s the takeaway?
Part of reviewing is trying to find the bad in with the good. If you don’t find any bad, you risk being panned as a shill for a company. That’s a risk I’m willing to take here, because yes, there’s two minor software hiccups. Hiccups that SteelSeries investigated and resolved quickly. The hard plastic likes to pick up dirt—which goes away easily with a damp cloth. The QcK, meanwhile, handles dirt like water off a duck’s back.
Movement on the QcK is precise and accurate–just the right amount of grip for any situation. But the Legendary Series performs excellently on my RatPadz GS and on a no-name cloth pad as well. The amount of territory the QcK Medium offers is plenty for dual 1920×1080 monitors, but you’ll probably want to step up to the Large for Eyefinity configurations. (The difference? Large is bigger!) If you’re like me and use high sensitivity and minimize physical travel, the Medium is the perfect balance.
I could point out my gripe about trying to compare DPI and CPI, but the long and short of it is: DPI is a holdover from printing, and the correct measure actually is counts per inch—counts being how many samples are taken per inch of movement at a given rate. So, 3200 CPI is what other manufacturers might call 3200 DPI (you can adjust it between 400 CPI and 3200 CPI, as well). Consider me enlightened and a bit red in the face, as I should have realized this one.
What about cost? The SteelSeries World of Warcraft Legendary Edition will set you back a whopping $80. It might sound expensive, but consider this: it’s an 11 button 3200 CPI mouse. Most comparable mice are going to set you back at least that much, and many of those will set you back at least $100. So you really can’t say that this mouse isn’t a great value. It’s cabled, but so are most of the others. There’s no ‘gold plated’ gimmicks here, though I would have preferred a nicer looking cord. But the cord and plug are solid and sturdy, so you can’t complain there either.
Try, try as I might, I can’t register a single major complaint about the surface or the mouse. I can’t find any. And the net of the minor complaints still doesn’t add up to a single major complaint or issue. Software glitches can (and do) happen. It’s just a fact of life. I couldn’t reproduce the issues on my laptop, so they got chalked up to ‘my system is weird.’
So as far as the QcK surface goes, if fabric is your favored surface, you can’t go wrong here. I’ve used a number of fabric pads, and the QcK is easily one of my favorites among the lot. Performance is consistent across the whole pad, the construction is solid, and the printing quality is fantastic. So if you play Diablo, StarCraft II or World of Warcraft, this is definitely something you can be proud to have on your desk. And if art isn’t your thing, it also comes in basic black. But what really makes the QcK stand out is its value. This top-class surface will set you back a whopping $15 for the QcK M with art, and $10 in basic black.
Even if you don’t play World of Warcraft, even if you don’t use all the special features there are, the SteelSeries World of Warcraft Legendary Edition is still a phenomenal all-around mouse. That’s what sets the Legendary Edition apart. Not only does it work well in all situations, the advanced features are adaptable to any application or situation. The construction, fit and finish are all top notch. It’s built like a tiny little tank, ready to handle abuse. It’s obvious that they really worked with people in the real world, just from how well the button pressures are tuned for every single button. You never find yourself accidentally clicking, or stressing to put enough pressure on a button.
So we’re not just honored to award Steelseries a Golden Fedora (our highest award for product excellence) for the QcK surface and World of Warcraft Legendary Edition mouse; we’re pleased to say that they earned every bit of it.
The SteelSeries World of Warcraft Legendary Edition mouse is available on Amazon. The QcK World of Warcraft surfaces are also available on Amazon.
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