Amanna is the latest blogger to bring up Warcrafter, a nifty little online application that is basically the Armory on speed. It'll not only pull up your character, your gear, and your talents, but it'll use all of that information to calculate everything you'd ever want to know about your stats, including DPS, crit percentage, spellpower, and even where all of those things come from. It'll even go into your spells, and calculate the average heal or average damage of your most-used spells and abilities. Warcrafter tells you everything it can calculate about your character, directly from the numbers pulled out of the Armory. Fascinating to see.

There is also a sandbox page, which is everything an aspiring theorycrafter would ever need to make up the character of their dreams. Punch in a class, race, and gear, and then go to town shifting around buffs, weapons, talents, and anything else you'd want to check. Cerberus is an attentive creator, too-- if there's a calculation off or a piece of gear missing, he seems more than happy to add it in. I only hope that we don't crush the site with our exposure.

The sandbox page mentions something about "locking" the character, and it would be cool to have a quick permalink setup for created characters (we could have someone show off all the buffs/gear needed to get the Ghost Wolf taming cast time down, or show off the highest possible spellpower available in the game so far). But other than that, Warcrafter is a great piece of web-based software. Very cool way to inspect every single aspect of your character out of game.

Amanna has mentioned an awesome little tool for tanking Druids with a great name: Rawr. It's a completely separate application for Windows (sorry Mac users) that will pull down your gear from the Armory, and help you not only see your tanking strengths and weaknesses, but help you choose upgrades, both in terms of gear and gems on it.

Astrylian of Kilrogg put it all together, and it looks like a really amazing tool for bears. Unfortunately, no other classes or Druid specs are supported yet (Astrylian says cats are next on the list), but if you're a bear who's been trying to make some good gear choices lately, this could be just what you need. Rawr is still in beta and available as a free download on the Druid wiki.

Amanna over at the Adventures in Azeroth blog has put together a useful "gem research center" for finding gems to fill those slots. Basically, she's just created some filters on Wowhead for you, so that if you need to find all the purple gems, all the Epic rated gems, or even something as specific as all of the Resto epic gems, the info's just a click away.

Don't forget as well that gems aren't necessarily permanent-- while putting a gem in a slot uses that gem up for good, you can still place another, better gem in that same slot. So since this guide is here, now might be a good time to go back and look at gear you picked up and slotted a while ago, and see if there are any easy upgrades to find now. Amanna also has a list of BoP gems, so even if you're not a JC or don't have one available, there are places you can go to get your own shiny rocks.

Definitely worth a bookmark. Amanna is also planning on putting something like this (a list of Wowhead filters, I believe) together for gear, so we'll keep an eye out for that as well.