Raiding Frustration & Ret Pally Withdrawal

Recently, my wife's work has kept me from raiding on our guild's set raid days. She gets home in time for me to log on about an hour after raid start, at which point is too late. The times that I have been able to raid, I have been needed as a healer, so I haven't had a taste of that oh so glorious dps I am used to contributing.

A couple days ago, I got to run three dungeons with some guildies, 2 being ToC. We had no issues with any of them, and I even got to DPS on Halls of Lightning. The problem though was seeing a fellow ret pally, who is very good at our class, out dps me by 200-300 dps. Normally, he and I hold about the same amount of dps, but the time I have been missing has left me without gear upgrades, and I already feel myself falling behind.

Luckily, if I continue to miss out on raids, I can still count on 3.3 helping keep up with gear. I'm not counting on free gear, but for those, like me, who suffer from raiding time restraints, it's nice to know there will be viable options to keep me relatively caught up in gear so that I can still contribute to our raids if needed.

Anyways, looks like we might be searching for an additional raid night, so I'm hoping it falls on one of the nights I'm available.