While last year's Kone Pro Air was a largely competent mouse, it did have some issues with polling stability, especially in conjunction with the RGB lighting, along with the distinct lack of a wireless extender, which you'd definitely expect to see included on a $130 mouse. Unfortunately, to this day the issues with polling stability have yet to be addressed. Even more unfortunate, however, is the fact that instead of fixing these issues with the Burst Pro Air, ROCCAT makes them worse.

Although the Burst Pro Air shares its internals with the Kone Pro Air, polling stability is infinitely worse. Both in wired and wireless (2.4 GHz) operation, there is not a single polling rate setting even approaching what could be deemed stable. The instability is grave to the point where general tracking, motion delay and even click latency are affected. Keep in mind that this assessment comes after ROCCAT has released a firmware update supposed to specifically address polling stability. From what I can tell, the main culprit is the RGB lighting. On the Kone Pro Air, polling stability only suffered if specific lighting effects were active, and the lighting could be turned off. On the Burst Pro Air, RGB lighting cannot be turned off, and polling is unstable no matter which lighting effect is chosen. Granted, brightness can be lowered to zero, which effectively disables the lighting, but for some reason, the underlying logic driving the lighting remains enabled. The degree or extent of the instability depends upon whether the RGB effect in question employs PWM. If set to a lighting effect that does not involve any PWM, polling stability slightly improves, though it still fails to meet minimum standards. In short, on the Burst Pro Air, polling stability will be poor no matter what the user does. What's more, the ramifications of said instability are easily measurable. Motion delay in wireless (2.4 GHz) operation in particular will vary significantly, going from 2 ms to 3 ms or even 5 ms, depending on how many polls are dropped. Under ideal conditions, the 1 ms previously displayed by the Kone Pro Air is achieved, but these are far and few inbetween. Click latency is likewise affected, with the latency being lower when a non-PWM lighting effect is active, though at no point the standard set by the Kone Pro Air is met. On the launch firmware, click latency was even higher due to unnecessarily high debounce, along with sensor data being limited to 12 bit, though thankfully, at least these issues in particular have been addressed.

In any case,severe polling instability ruins what otherwise would be a decent mouse. Worse, from what I can tell, the issues with polling are unfixable. I'm saying "decent" because even outside of polling stability, the Burst Pro Air has its fair share of issues. First of all, as with the Kone Pro Air, a wireless extender is nowhere to be found in the box, and the same goes for a replacement set of mouse feet, the latter of which comes with the Kone Pro Air at least by now. Given that even $60 wireless mice manage to include a wireless extender, there is simply no excuse for a $100 mouse not to have one. Another issue is the software. ROCCAT Swarm is truly showing its age these days, from the dated design, the curiously high resource usage including considerable CPU time, to the sheer number of bugs. There is a setting that simply disappears upon switching to wireless, yet takes effect all the same, the energy saving setting is either bugged or just poorly designed, and the fact that a routine exercise such as updating the firmware may take upwards of ten minutes leaves me in disbelief.

The battery life indicator isn't accurate either, which turns gauging expected battery life into a guessing game. ROCCAT cites up to 100 hours, which only applies to Bluetooth without illumination, so battery life in 2.4 GHz mode at 1000 Hz and with full illumination can be expected to be just a fraction, despite the rather large 500 mAh battery. Furthermore, at just 0.178 A, charging the Burst Pro Air will take quite a while, which is only made somewhat bearable by the fact that the charging cable matches that of the Kone Pro Air in terms of flexibility, allowing one to continue using the mouse while charging, without feeling overly restricted. The large battery is also one of the main reasons why the Burst Pro Air weighs significantly more than the Burst Pro at 70 g, along with the addition of more RGB lighting. At 81 g, the Burst Pro Air isn't exceedingly heavy, but compared to ROCCAT's own Kone Pro Air at 73 g, one cannot help but think that ROCCAT simply could not be bothered to refine the design to allow for lower weight. This is doubly curious as the build quality isn't on the level of the Kone Pro Air or Burst Pro, either, as activating the back side button at least is possible by squeezing the sides, and my sample also has a slight rattle.

Is there anything good to report? I still think the Burst series has one of the better optical switch implementations, and this applies to the Burst Pro Air, too. As always with optical switches, there may be a noticeable degree of variance between the left and right button, as is the case on my sample. The left main button has significantly higher pre-travel than the right one, yet feels snappy, whereas the right button feels rather dull and muted. The side buttons, on the other hand, utilize traditional mechanical switches, which manage to impress with their very low pre and post-travel, along with their firm and snappy actuation. When it comes to the scroll wheel, ROCCAT didn't make any compromises and opted for an encoder from ALPS, which provides very tactile yet somewhat noisy scrolling. The feet are unchanged compared to the Burst Pro and continue to glide fantastically well right out of the box.

Overall, the Burst Pro Air simply fails to meet expectations. If performance would at least match the Kone Pro Air, one could make a case for the Burst Pro Air at $99.99, but considering the extent of issues it suffers from, even $49.99 would be $49.99 too much. Given the wide range of worthwhile wireless options available these days, there is no good reason to even consider the Burst Pro Air.