I took a long break from first-person shooter (FPS) games to play massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), but recently came back to play Team Fortress 2.  Unfortunately my 400 dpi mouse (a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical) was proving to be very dated for this kind of gameplay.  It was time to upgrade, but to what?

After doing some research, the Razer Lachesis mouse which boasted a whopping 4000 dpi caught my eye.   The competing mice generally did around half the dpi of this mouse, so I was left wondering whether that 4000 dpi made a significant difference, at least for FPS gaming.  Determined to find the answer to this question, I asked Razer to send me a Lachesis.  They responded by sending me a DeathAdder mouse.  The DeathAdder, being the older cousin of the Lachesis, made for a good comparative test so I went ahead and bought the Lachesis anyway.  Now that I've evaluated the two, I'm not surprised that they sent me the DeathAdder instead. 

The Feel:

The Lachesis proved to be slightly shorter in height than the DeathAdder, yet a little longer at the fingers.  Having small hands, I prefer mice that keep my hand low and close to the mousepad making the Lachesis a more appealing choice for me.  The Lachesis is amply supplied with nine programmable buttons compared to the DeathAdder's five.  If you like to play southpaw, the Lachesis allows you to use either hand comfortably whereas the DeathAdder is made for the right hand only.  The Lachesis has a nicer feel than the DeathAdder, possibly because it has less smooth plastic on the sides than the DeathAdder does.  There isn't a significant difference between the weights of the two mice.  Overall, both mice felt very natural in my hand.

The Drivers:

You can store settings information such as sensitivity, dpi, button assignment, macros, etc. in the firmware for these mice.  Sounds neat right?  Well not really.  In concept it sounds good but in reality it's a big pain in the rear to set up the drivers on multiple machines.  I was going to give away my old mouse, but frankly it's more portable than these two mice so I'll be keeping it around as a backup for when I don't want to fiddle with driver chaos.  And although most people won't have this issue, don't even think about trying to setup both DeathAdder and Lachesis drivers on the same machine.  I ended up using three different machines to test the mice so that I wouldn't go crazy with driver installations.

Although they look similar in content, the DeathAdder drivers are far better than the Lachesis.  The Lachesis drivers won't let me even save my profile.  When you click to save your profile, it brings up a window asking you to open a file instead (how did QA not catch THAT one I wonder).  What's worse is that these terribly buggy drivers make this mouse ridiculously hard to use since it tends to randomly skip pixels when you move the cursor. According to the Razer website, this is a known bug that will get fixed in the next firmware update.  Unfortunately I've been unsuccessful in getting my hands on the beta to see if it indeed does fix my problem, so until I do, this mouse might as well be a fancy paper weight as it's bugging out on 2 out of 3 of my machines.  Even working in Windows is difficult with this bug.

Another annoying point with the Lachesis drivers is that the buttons on the mouse wheel are set by default to switch the dpi, which would be great if there was some sort of visual feedback telling you that the dpi has changed (I think that would come in particularly useful when playing a sniper).  I've played part-way through matches wondering why my aim felt so "off" only to realize that I accidentally hit the dpi key. 

One other point I should mention, although I'm not sure if this is again due to poor drivers, is the fact that the Lachesis often had to be replugged into my USB port when I rebooted my machine for some odd reason.  Keep in mind that my mouse tends to fall off of my desk a lot.  My poor Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical by all logic should have been thrown in the garbage long ago with the number of times I've accidentally dropped it, but it managed to survive the torture I've put it through all of these years. So either something is buggy with the drivers or this mouse is so fragile it couldn't stand a few weeks in my office.  I'm hoping it's just the drivers.

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