Setup, Design & Observations
In hand, the Elite controller feels insanely good though a little front heavy, some may in fact find it a little too heavy at around 350g but I had no real issue with it. The paddles fell almost perfectly in position with your hand grip, though I felt that the actuation force was a little too light and it was rather easy to press them by accident, or even they could be activated simply by placing the controller down on a hard surface sometimes causing an annoyance. However, due to how quick it is to customise, it was easy to remove 2x of the paddles, and just use 2 remapped buttons, for example in Halo 5, I used the shorter right paddle for melee, and the left for jump. This easily allowed for full motion in an intense situation. Sure I could have used the other paddles for reload for 100% stick time, but I found just the two adequate in this scenario. In Gears of War Ultimate Edition, it is very easy to become a 2piece whore with melee attack re-mapped to the paddle, having full control of the aiming while hitting the melee button gave that next level accuracy which will make others rage quit. It is worth noting that the redesigned thumbsticks and enclosures were specifically designed to reduce wear around the full circle of the housing, where previously, the plastic on plastic could grind.
The various accessories came in handy too, for example, the taller sticks gave better control and accuracy for sniping (Gears, Halo 5) and steering in Forza 6, while keeping the comfort of the shorter stick where needed. The biggest confusion after experiencing the Elite controller is the satellite D-pad. This should be standard for the Xbox controller. The standard cross type, while is a massive improvement upon the abomination found on the 360 controller, as a stand alone D-pad, if used for actual games and not just glorified extra buttons, is still quite bad. This is because of the distance between each directional position makes it very difficult to press diagonal directions. The satellite dish does away with this problem, giving you a working 8 way directional dish which feels great, without being too big, gives little resistance to your thumb, so no big movements of friction destruction, and gives that exact precision you desire, finally making a high quality, viable D-pad which can actually be useful on the Xbox.
The hair triggers felt mostly pointless in my experience, even once you customise the trigger sensitivity, this seems like quite a missed opportunity. For games which simply require an 'on-off' function from the trigger, many, including myself, would prefer a short travel distance with a quick return. Though the 'hair trigger' stops still give you 50% travel distance and is not adjustable like what is found on SCUF controllers. At 50% travel distance, there is actually little, physical distance left to actually move and seemingly the whole thing seems to be a waste of time. Though this isn't to say that people will not like this feature, it just seems 'poorly' implemented.
Battery life of the Xbox Elite controller seems to be quite reasonable, easily exceeded 15hours, though considering the extra features like 4 point vibration it is unlikely to achieve the 40hours which is toted by the SteelSeries Stratus XL. You can then move on to used wired by the decent braided cable which was included, though it does seem a bit cheeky that they didn't include a rechargeable battery as standard.
