HSK Pro: The Last Penlike Mouse?
For the past four years or so, I’ve considered this mouse my main, the HSK Pro. I’ve spent time with other popular picks and other fingertip mice, but the HSK Pro was the only one that offered me that ultra-fingertip centric experience that I came to love. It was so deep into its niche that I went as far to say this:
I don’t know what the next time we’ll see a mouse this small and light will come out again, and we might be waiting on modders to fill that niche.
- from the Fingertip Mouse Tier List
in my last video talking about the subject.
But since then, G-Wolves, in all of their insanity, has made two new mice that seem to fit in that niche. The spiritual successor to the HSK Pro, the Fenrir Pro, and the literal successor, the HSK Pro 2.
Without a doubt, between one of these two mice, I will have a new main. So let’s talk about what they’ve upgraded.
What makes these mice interesting?
The HSK Pro 2
We’ll start with the HSK Pro 2: this is a mouse I was vaguely aware was coming for a couple months, and G-Wolves had teased that he had a 14 gram mouse on the horizon. But when the HSK Pro 2 was announced… it wasn’t it.
Here’s the patch notes:
- upgraded MCU
- new switches
- USB-C, dual mode pcb
- shaved off a few grams
The MCU change is somewhat noteworthy, as it should bring its sensor performance up to par with the best and allow for a mode enabling more responsive clicks (SPDT). And I was kinda excited for dual mode and usbc changes too, because it meant I could rip out the battery and run a lightweight cable, getting higher polling rates and slightly improved weight without the battery life tax.
It’s still my favorite shape of all time, and any level of improvement was more than welcome.
The Fenrir Pro
So the Fenrir Pro. If you’ve seen my ftip tier list you probably know that the Fenrir series was one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever had in the hobby. They were the first mice to iterate on the HSK Pro, but in terms of aiming experience they felt entirely different, all because of one factor: width. Part of what made the HSK Pro so unique was how it promoted an inwards angle on your fingers, a pinch grip of sorts, that really defined that pen-like experience. But even just a few millimeters of width difference was enough to make that experience completely go away.
So, where does the Fenrir pro stand in terms of width? The HSK Pro has a width of 53mm, the Asym, 60, and the Fenrir Pro was… 57. It was entirely possible that it could still create that feeling of finger engagement with a middle ground width like that. On top of that, this one does actually have all of the G-Wolves modernizations. Baseless design, sub 20 grams, ultra low button height, and top of the line tech.
Right before I got it I was chatting with the G-Wolves owner, telling him how excited I was for this mouse. And he said I should be, because it’s basically the same shape as the HSK pro.
But my first impressions… were that this thing felt completely different. To the point where I don’t think they’re even in the same niche. How is that possible if the outlines look like this on eloshapes, and the difference in width is what, three millimeters?
But that difference reminded me of another purchase I made recently: a speedcube.
How can they feel so different?
I was looking through a bunch of options, settling on one of the new flagship releases from GAN, because I was mainly curious about all the new tech the community had been cooking up. The GAN 16 was the flagship model with all of the bells and whistles, and it costed a pretty penny because of that. The GAN v100 was like the budget version of that, boasting most of the same tech but for half the price. So I watched a lot of reviews about that one. Every review talked about how it was really good for small hands, some people not being able to use it well due to the size and others loving it because of that. The marketing material even went as far as to say that it’s a good pick for kids.
And the difference in size between the v100 and standard speedcubes is… one millimeter. It’s 55 millimeters instead of 56.
These types of differences are things that have to be felt to be understood. People bring up so many mice that are supposedly OP1 clones, but once you try them both side by side in your hands, they feel almost nothing alike. Subtle differences in width and curvature make for huge differences towards in-hand feel, and something like that isn’t really represented from just an outline comparison.
I was really disappointed honestly. It wasn’t the mouse I thought it would be, and diverged from what made the original so special.
Two weeks later…
But I kept using it anyway. My HSK’s scroll wheel finally starting breaking down and that meant I used this mouse for a lot of my daily activities, and it stayed on my desk a lot. Every day that I used it… I found I started liking the mouse more and more. Instead of seeing it as a failed clone of the HSK, I started to see it as its own thing.
And that “thing” was everything I originally wanted out of the Fenrir series.
I mentioned in my review of the other Fenrirs that they felt really good for stability and way easier to use your arm with compared to the HSK Pro, but was just a bit too limiting in terms of fingertip mobility. This mouse doesn’t have that problem. You get all those stability benefits and I still get maybe… 75% of my fingertip engagement. In some cases it’s even better than the HSK Pro in that regard, because there are far fewer situations where I feel the need to tense my fingers. Using and blending with muscle groups other than my fingers felt so much easier too, even with all my HSK Pro experience.
Another big contributing factor to that is the boxiness of the shape. Compared to the HSK Pro, the inwards taper is much more subtle, which I’d guess is the main reason it doesn’t create that pen-like sensation. Without the taper encouraging a pinch grip, you end up with a much more standard feeling experience. Which for most people, is a good thing.
Button height is the last shape change that I think is just straight up better. Using smaller switches allows them to make these really deep comfort curves that get your fingers shockingly close to the pad, which to me, adds to the feeling of control and precision.
I think this mouse is really, really good. I’ve tried two now that both feel perfect, and I think this is just my new default recommendation for fingertip mice. I’ve kinda struggled giving suggestions for players who want a really optimized fingertip mouse since the Asym, Max, and HSK Pro are so divisive, and the other options don’t lean in nearly as hard as Gwolves does… but this is it. If I had to put it on the tier list, it’s in S tier and it’s a pretty large power gap compared to A tbh.
Possible issues
Before we move on, I want to quickly mention its issues. The first is the side buttons again. My thumb is really small and without grip tape I am bumping right up against the front side button. I honestly thought this would be a much bigger issue on the Fenrir Asym though and I haven’t really heard that many complaints about it. Grip tape, which is pretty much necessary anyway, does make it a lot better.
Then there’s the base, or lack thereof. A lot of people say you can’t use Artisan dots or other bigger skates on this mouse and… maybe much bigger skates would be a problem but I don’t think having a little bit of overhang on the Artisan dots does really does anything to the aiming experience. I used it for a couple weeks and I thought it was totally fine.
That’s pretty much it though. Of course it will be a bit more fragile than most mice, but it’s quite study for what it is.
But my new main isn’t decided yet!!
What about the HSK Pro 2?
We still have to talk about the HSK Pro v2. Out of the box, this mouse felt… pretty much exactly the same as the v1. Which for a v2 coming out 4 years after the original, that’s not exactly the unboxing experience you want.
The first thing I noticed was the weight. Even after taking out the battery and side buttons, when the last mouse I used was the Fenrir Pro, there is a feeling of denseness here. When doing quick motions in the air, you can feel that every motion carries quite a bit more momentum, and it does add up over the course of a game or a run. In the grand scheme of things, it’s absolutely splitting hairs, but it’s the type of thing you notice when you use them back to back, and the stock experience is smaller and 50% heavier after all.
But the weight overall should be a bit better right? Well, I don’t know if it’s just my scale or my copy or what, but it looks like it’s exactly the same? I asked around and got similar testimonies, with everybody’s copies landing around 29 to 30 grams. Usually being a little bit off in terms of weight doesn’t bother me, but promising weight savings and ending up sometimes being heavier than the original is a bit frustrating.
As for sensor performance, yeah, that’s good I guess. MAN all I wanted was for my favorite shape to get the modern G-Wolves treatment and it’s just almost exactly the same. Just imagine, 14 to 20 grams, using those same half size switches to lower the button height, maybe a bit of iteration on the taper… It would have been like the best mouse ever.
two more weeks later.
It took me a couple of weeks to have my thoughts on these two mice fully mature. I realized that my feelings towards these mice were like how you initially feel about a twist ending. The entire time it feels the story is building up to something, throwing you hints and details that constantly get you to update your internal prediction and when you finally get there… it reframes all of those thoughts and experiences.
The HSK Pro 2 is the story that’s always building up to this huge cathartic moment, like unraveling a mystery, but the real explanation was pedestrian and understated. It creates a feeling of indignation—like they didn’t even try. It makes you question, well, what was even the point of all of that?
But after sitting with that: that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While it wasn’t the grand, transformative experience I was hoping for, the more I sat with it, the more okay I became with that.
I was hoping for a transformation like the HTS to the HTS Ultra, but what I got was the OP18k to the OP18K v2. It’s better, but exclusively in a technical sense, with the user experience being almost identical. There’s nothing about this fact that is bad though, it’s only a problem because of what I was expecting.
The Fenrir Pro is the twist ending that rattles you. It reframes the entire story in a way that makes you distant from the emotions you experienced leading up to it. But as you think about it more, you begin to realize that the twist is so much better than the ending you saw coming in your head, and it becomes hard to even imagine it ending in any other way. It’s perfect, just not in the way you expected it to be.
With that said, we get a bit more perspective: both of these, based on the criteria I set out in my ftip tier list, are S tier mice. They are at the very top of their respective niches.
There really is no other mouse like the HSK Pro, and the experience is uniquely its own within the market. I still love this thing.
But between these two mice I would recommend the Fenrir Pro nine times out of ten.
On paper it’s just the better mouse, there’s a significantly lower chance you’ll hate it, and it has a much more forgiving learning curve. This mouse even got Viscose to finally click with a fingertip mouse too, something that nothing else in my collection has ever done.
If that penlike experience appeals to you or you want the most unique FPS experience a mouse can offer you. That’s where the HSK Pro wins. I still hope one day we see a real modernization of the HSK Pro, but I can appreciate the improvements we got, as small as they might be.
So, I still have to answer the question. Which one of these mice will I main moving forward? I can confidently say that… I’m not sure. But that’s the last outcome I was expecting, and it’s a testament to just how good the Fenrir Pro is despite not being what I thought I wanted. It could go either way at this point, and it would take something leaning into the HSK Pro’s niche even more to really shake up the matchup. (dramatic pan to f1)
Thanks for reading.