This paper shows the analytical performance expressions of M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation burst symbol transmission for hybrid decode-or-amplify-forward (HDAF) relay schemes over quasi-static Rayleigh-fading channels. First, we derive the probability density function of the received instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio as the simplified form, which is related to all the possible occurrence probabilities of error-events for M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation burst transmission. On the basis of the derived probability density function, we express average bit error probability, average symbol error probability, and average burst error rate as closed forms, which can be also applied to both amplify-and-forward and adaptive decode-and-forward (ADF) schemes. The analysis and simulation results show that HDAF scheme for burst transmission can achieve the performance of ADF scheme with symbol-by-symbol transmission, which is the achievable lower bound. Furthermore, the outage probability, the normalized channel capacity, and the goodput performance are also derived as closed forms. The analysis shows the superiority of HDAF scheme to ADF scheme. Comparison with simulations confirms that the derived analytical expressions are accurate over all signal-to-noise ratio regions and for different numbers of relays and modulation orders.