Blizzplanet Review: SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse

SteelSeries played catch with Blizzplanet and threw us a fast-ball special. Patiently and eagearly, I have been checking downstairs at reception to see if the shipped goodies had arrived. SteelSeries had told me the box was on its way the day the SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse and the SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Headset were out on sale.

The reception had removed the paper to verify which rooms had mail and I was already leaving when out of the corner of my eye I saw a logo. It took my brain a few seconds to post-process once the window was out of view. I then back-paddled to check out whatever my eye caught. There it was. It was on the counter table standing tall on its side, a huge box with the SteelSeries logo.

Immediately, I told the receptionist that was for me. I took the box home, and started to unpack the contents.

My ego deflated when I saw the large box was half empty. I don’t know which thought won in my head: “Why ship it in such a large box to have it half empty?”, or “Zomg, they could have added some extra ones to fill up the other half (grins)”; but don’t listen to this troll’s back-of-my-mind arguments. All those nonsense thoughts evaporated, and my ego inflated at a dangerous rate when I looked at the bottom of the box …

SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse Unboxing

All the photos you will see in this page are taken by me at the moment of unboxing this product. The SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse and the SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Headset boxes were there staring back at me.

The box is made of hard cardboard to protect the content. It can be used later to store your eSport Professional Mouse, and fits easily in a backpack. Imagine taking this box out of your backpack in front of your friends. Their jaw will drop definitely. You can’t deny you love to do that. You, evil you.

What’s behind the box? Basically a round up on the specs in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish.

1. Optimal comfort with an ambidextrous shape and size, making it versatile for all types of gamer grips.

2. 7 ergonomically placed programmable buttons.

3. World’s most durable switches – guaranteed lifespan of 10 million clicks.

4. Programmable Diablo III®-themed illumination options.

5. Durable, double-braided nylon cord with a gold-plated USB connection.

6. Quick and effortless remapping of mouse buttons with Drag & Drop, pre-defined game actions/functions/skills as well as illumination settings. All of which are easily configured in an intuitive Diablo III®-themed driver available for Windows and Mac OS X users.

As I attempted to open the box, I noticed the front of the box actually opens up like a book to show the interior letting you see the mouse covered by a plastic, and on the left side of the inner-book-cover is an artwork of Tyrael. I was dumbfounded. How did the cover didn’t come out loose whenever I kept moving the box around to see the back and side? Took me a bit to figure it out. It keeps itself closed because the packaging designer added a magnet for flavor which keeps it tight closed.

The text is localized in the same four languages: “The fast-paced action of Diablo III requires quick response times and a weapon that will withstand the fury of the Prime Evils. Co-designed with the creators of Diablo III, the SteelSeries Diablo III mouse is built to aid you in your quest against the forces of the Burning Hells. An ambidextrous shape, a comfortable grip, and oversized pressure points all help ensure a smooth glide for quick movements. The SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse has been engineered and designed to survive and conquer the relentless punishment of the Burning Hells, with a guaranteed lifespan of 10 million clicks — 3x more than an average mouse.

Prepare for victory.”

Inside the box, you will find a re-sealable bag with the Quick Start Guide, a folded catalog containing several Blizzard Licensed Products, and SteelSeries products; and a SteelSeries sticker.

SteelSeries Product Catalog

On display are the following SteelSeries Blizzard Licensed Products:

Product Review

First, let’s go to the basics of what a gaming mouse should be and do for your personal taste.

Ambidextrous: The majority of mice I have purchased in the past have had an ergonomic shape designed for right-hands, and usually small in size for my big hand. As you have read, the Diablo III Mouse has an ambidextrous design, so It’s taking me a bit to get used to this big mouse.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are many players who use the left hand to play, and this mouse does justice to both. SteelSeries doesn’t discriminate or penalize one or the other. Ambidextrous for the win. You win.

Comfortability: The Diablo III Mouse is comfortable. It takes a while, and a bit of use to get used to it. I have been using it for a while, and my hand and wrist don’t feel exhausted. I also have to say that the SteelSeries QcK Diablo III Gaming Mouse Pad makes the Diablo III Mouse slide back and forth smoothly and precisely.

That not only comes handy with video games such as Diablo III, but for your day-to-day applications like Adobe Photoshop CS.

Durability: As soon as SteelSeries announced the SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse a few months ago, around the Summer, I have to be honest … I fell in love with it.

I have a story about my consumption of mice over the past decade. In the initial years, when I had a Mac G4 Tower, and later the HP Pavillion I used to spend a bit over $20.00 in mice. Usually Logitech Mice. Some of them with several programmable buttons. I grew intensely fed up of those. Gamers are a special breed of computer users. We multi-task between gaming, and fragging the heck out of players in Half-Life, Doom, Team Fortress, and other FPS/Deathmatch games; chatting on AOL, YIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ; browsing soundtracks; viewing Marvel/DC comics Online, and working on our favorite flavor of software applications.

Bottomline, we punish the mice like no one else. Soon or later, my Logitech mice became unresponsive and ended up in the trash can. After 2005, a year and a half into World of Warcraft — I was in the 2004 beta in case you wonder — I ended up giving up on Logitech and consequently on any company who ever sold a Mouse over $10.00. That’s right. All of them. These past six years I haven’t consumed anything but cheap mice ranging $2.99 – 8.99. Different companies. It didn’t matter to me.

The reason? Mice Durability. As a gamer the mice are punished so, that I end up replacing my mice once or twice a year. It doesn’t matter if the mice are 2.99 or $69.99 … all of them have the same flaw: the thin cord. That’s all this story leads to. The thin cord. As gamers, we keep moving the mice all around the place. Sooner or later, the bending that thin cord back and forth will cause the interior cabling to wear off and break.

Have you experienced this? When the mice stops working and the laser goes off. You play around with the cable inch by inch and suddenly the laser turns on. That’s the thin cable bending at a certain point causing the internal cable to stop communicating with the mouse. There goes your expensive mice. Straight into the trash can.

Going back to when SteelSeries announced the SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse , I fell in love straight there. Upon close inspection of the photo what caused me to jaw-drop was the cabling. It looked like a cobra. A thick cable shielding protecting the inside from the rigorous mistreatment and punishment we gamers give mice.

I really need to smack this one at your face again, even if it’s there in the Mice specs I posted above. Read and sing along with me folks: “Durable, double-braided nylon cord with a gold-plated USB connection.”

Mozzart and Beethoven come short against SteelSeries. That single sentence there is music to my ears. This is what I have been waiting for for a decade to make me come out of my self-exiled retirement from Professional Mice. I might end up buying another one at some point for my elder parent, who’s also a gamer. She also wasted about a couple of mice a year.

I am not able to give you the experience of touching this cable, but the SteelSeries description gives you an idea of what to expect from this product. It’s a solid cable. If you attempt to bend the cord, you will notice a very strong and solid opposition to do so. You can’t harm it unless you really try hard. Period.

Another bonus. After I removed my cheap mouse, I compared the length of its cable against the Diablo III Mouse. I jaw-dropped. The Diablo III Mouse’s cord is a full feet longer. You heard it: “12-inches longer” than your average mouse cord. The Diablo III Mouse’s cord-length is 2 meters (6.5 Feet).

Aesthetics: It’s Diablo III-themed. Heck, do you need another reason to love its looks? The mouse-wheel is wider than anything I have ever seen — and trust me, at a rate of nigh two mice a year for a decade I have seen my share of mice (over 20).

The outer-layer of the wheel has a rubber with the shape of scales. Think of Deathwing-like spinal cord scales. Perfect for scrolling and traction against your fingertip. Many of those cheap mice I used to have kept sliding and skipping with their awful or lack of traction.

I’m having problems with the buttons on the right side of the Diablo III mouse. As I wrote this article, I kept accidentally pushing the side button with the fourth finger (right-hand). I had programmed it to hit the “4” keyboard button. Thus, the SteelSeries Engine macro would type “4” while I typed this article. Then I realized … this is an ambidextrous mouse. Decided to clear the macro for that button, and it hasn’t given me further issues. My fingers are kinda long and big, so no blame there.

Now on the most obvious aesthetics, who doesn’t love to see that Diablo III Logo illumination humming on and off. Watch my video in the dark to see the Diablo III logo illumination (Note: Lower your sound. Loud music. Switch video quality to 720HD, and click the fullscreen button to see the programmable buttons UI)

Gameplay: I might update this review later to offer in-depth feedback. So far I programmed the two buttons on the left-side of the Diablo III Mouse to activate macros. I don’t really have to type a macro perse. All I do is choose the button in the SteelSeries Engine UI, and press the button I wish to program that button with. In this case, the button “1” and “2” on my keyboard correspond to the Diablo III Beta spell bar.

It felt fantastic to be able to cast Electrocute with the left-button using my index finger, Wave of Force with the right-button using my middle finger, and suddenly shoot an Arcane Orb and Shock Pulse with my thumb finger.

Noise: A fan asked me about the noise made by all the clicking in a click-intensive game like Diablo III, concerned about his wife. I used a Logitech Mouse (my parent’s), a cheap Orange mouse, and the SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse to test clicking. Curiously, the Logitech mouse barely made any clicking noise. However, the thin cord of the Logitech means the mouse won’t have a long lifespan with Diablo III. The double-braided nylon cord in the SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse, thus a longer lifespan, alone makes it a better investment.

SteelSeries needs to work a bit on click-noise design to counter Logitech, but to be fair the SteelSeries Diablo III mouse was designed in such a way, that most of the sound decibels from clicking seem to be cancelled out. The noise is mostly internal. The cheaper mouse had a more aggressive external clicking noise. Here’s an MP3 sound recording (WMA here) of the cheap mouse vs the SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse. It was recorded with the SteelSeries Diablo III Headset’s built-in extendable microphone.

Additional Specs

Frames per Second: 12000

Inches per Second: 150

Counts per Inch: 100-5700

Acceleration: 30 G

Sensor Data Path: True 16-bit

Lift Distance: ~2 mm

Buttons: 8

Cable: 2 m / 6.5 Ft (braided)

SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse Drivers

The Quick Start Guide seen in one of the photos only has two readable pages, so no need to brainstorm and read lots of pages. Most of the pages are localizations in other languages.

To get started, once you removed the mouse from the packaging, connect the USB connector into an available USB port in the back or front of your PC or Mac computer / laptop.

The mouse will be operational right away after Windows auto-installs a basic driver. However, you must go to https://www.steelseries.com/downloads

Your browser might prompt a frame stopping the redirection. Click the OK button if your browser does that to redirect to the appropriate Download page. Otherwise go to the website manually and hover your mouse over the “Support” link at the top of the page, and select “Downloads”.

A list of images will show up detailing each product. Somewhere around the middle you will see the Diablo III Mouse image. Click it, and below it a small frame will appear showing you two different drivers for your mouse: Mac or PC. Make sure to download the correct driver.

The driver is around 28MB, and it might take around five minutes to download depending your internet connection speed.

Locate and run the installer and follow the instructions.

Mouse Settings Interface

Once done, the SteelSeries Engine driver tray icon will appear at the bottom-right of your screen (on Windows OS).

Clicking the Open SteelSeries Engine will popup the interface (UI). Choose open image in a new tab to see the original size.

The Statistics tab keeps record of how many times you have clicked each individual button. So far, I have clicked the left button 29483 times. The right button: 2196 times. You can set a timer by pressing the start button to start recording how many clicks you perform in a specific timeframe.

Conclusions

I definitely look forward to get a second SteelSeries Diablo III Gaming Mouse . It’s been two days using it for gaming and day-to-day tasks. It looks badass, and provides a firm grip.

This device has returned my faith in professional peripherals. The cord looks like it’s going to last me several years, which in turn protects your investment. A mouse costing $69.99 should last longer than a cheap mouse. The mice cord and its durability marks the difference between a cheap mouse and a professional mouse. SteelSeries got the formula right with the Diablo III Mouse.

Next up, Blizzplanet will review the Diablo III Headset on Tuesday, and giveaway a SteelSeries QcK Diablo III Mousepad. Stay tuned.