Peripheral manufacturer Steelseries has revisited its World of Warcraft licence again, with the third iteration of its MMO mouse. Similar in size, shape and button number to the 'Legendary' edition of last year, the new WoW controller is wireless and preprogrammed with no less than 130 game commands.
It's the perennial problem for most MMO and strategy games: so many shortcuts, and so few fingers to hit them with. While your keyboard hand struggles with rows of bound buttons, though, all your mouse hand is doing is tapping scrolling around and tapping on a couple of a hard to miss paddles. Time to put those lazy appendages to work.
I'll be honest, I've not yet tried an MMO mouse that's really grown on me, and find tiny thumb controls much harder to hit with accuracy than keyboard shortcuts with Shift, Ctrl or Alt modifiers. Still, if you have a more dexterous digits than I do, the WoW Wireless looks like one of the more sensible layouts around, with buttons evenly spread beneath various fingers rather than clumped together beneath a thumb.
The back of the mouse is illumanited with the WoW maelstrom symbol.
It's up against a lot of competition, though. Razer recently updated its MMO range with a new Naga variant that places six extra keys on the side in a in a hexagon pattern. The new WoW wireless will cost $129.99 or €129.99, depending on your region, which makes the $70 Naga look a bit more tempting.
