My current mouse is starting to go and I’m looking at options. I use it for browsing, gaming and I may use it for productivity tasks like Blender and UE4.
What features tend to be most useful?
What brands have a good reputation and which should be avoided?
If you’re going to go wireless you really need to go with a “gaming” branded mouse, which is usually a turn off for me personally. you want something that is polling that mouse at least once every few milliseconds. Cheap wireless mice don’t do that and you get alto of latency which is sub-optimal for gaming.
Otherwise go wired.
for wireless I can only recommend Logitech’s gaming line since they are the only ones I have extended experience with. They are pricey though.
I’d say you really only need high sample rates for “twitch” gaming. That is, fast-paced multiplayer shooters (and maybe RTSes). For slower-paced gaming there’s not much point.
I like high DPI mice not for gaming but because I want to move the mouse as little as possible. I think my current one is 4800 dpi; that means the entire ~7000 pixel width of my desktop setup can be traversed in 1.5" of physical space.
Naw, a pair of 30" at 2560 and a third 24" at 1920.
I… don’t really have an opinion on those mice. My experience is that just about all mice have the basic tracking down, so it mostly comes down to price, comfort, and other features. It’s hard to guess the comfort level on those; the last in particular looks a bit too angular for my tastes, but maybe it’s not bad in practice.
One feature that I really like is a button that switches the scroll wheel from smooth to ratcheting. Gaming needs the detents so as to select a specific weapon, but I like web browsing with the smooth scroll. A few Logitech models have this feature.