Back in the BC days it was easier to plan your gear upgrades – there were certain well agreed-upon items that were clearly best-in-slot, and just about every class knew which instance they should head to in order to get specific upgrades. With the flurry of 5-man instances, the addition of a couple of 10-man instances, and new hard-modes and heroics where the gear that drops from the same instance is of higher quality, it’s a little more difficult these days to really plan out your upgrades, especially if you’re looking at getting the gear required to get into some of those 25-man hard-modes.

Thankfully there’s Rawr, a tiny little portable app that you can use to test out upgrades, various enchants and gems, and to see how your stats will be affected if you choose one piece of gear over another potential one. Since Rawr is completely portable, once you download it you can drop it on a USB flash drive and carry it around with you. You may need to do the extensive Armory or WoWhead update once to make sure you have all of the source information for all of the items correct, but once you’ve done it, you can load your character from the Armory and see what items make the most sense for your character.

The video above is pretty long, but it’s an incredibly detailed tour of the application and all of the things you can do with it. Now that getting badges and getting geared up is as simple as running a few random dungeons using the Dungeon Finder, it’s more important than ever to know whether or not you want something when it drops from a boss, and to know what you should get when you have a bag full of badges and no idea what to spend them on. Download the app and give it a try!