I’ve always been a little sceptical of wireless mice. Back in the early days of World of Warcraft I was raiding a boss in Molten Core, when suddenly the batteries died. Without a spare pair of AAs to hand, my evening’s onslaught toward Ragnaros was crippled. At that moment, I swore never to be hobbled by a wireless mouse again.

It’s taken the first wireless mouse from SteelSeries to persuade me to give them another go. With a built in lithium-ion battery and the option to go wired if the battery dies, the World of Warcraft Wireless MMO Gaming Mouse promised to overturn my preconceptions. After putting it through a barrage of tests I have to admit: I’m impressed.

Alongside the mouse, I also tried out the SteelSeries QcK Panda Monk Edition mousepad. With high quality artwork based on Blizzard’s latest expansion, I was eager to find out how mouse and pad would work together to provide the control and precision needed – not just for Mists of Pandaria, but for other popular MMOs as well.

Many of us are drawn to MMOs because of the persistent world they create. Log in and our characters are there, ready to explore, quest, raid or anything else we choose. But even though these worlds are always online and open for play, our access to them isn’t. We’re either tethered to a desktop or locked to a laptop with all our games and settings, always in range of a broadband connection or Wi-Fi signal.

The theory was that tablets would change all that. With a high resolution screen and buckets of battery life, this could finally be the high powered laptop that would get us into MMOs, whenever and wherever we chose. Unfortunately, it’s not been the case. Aside from some tablet-only titles and specialist screen-casting software, playing MMOs on our iPads has remained lackluster.

Enter the Microsoft Surface. With Windows 8 out of the box and packing a meaty processor, it feels like these would be ideal for cranking up an MMO on the move. With that in mind, we’ve taken a closer look at the latest from Redmond, in order to discover if it can truly offer mobile MMO nirvana.