Can we just remove shards from the game?

[gornotck]

What wards? I don't have a gathering retainer leveled up yet, so I'm not sure what you mean.

Between leveling Botanist and Miner, not a retainer, you get six Wards that increase their specific aetheric attribute shard collection (and eventually crystal and clusters) by 2 for 400 GP. So it increases the amount of shards you can get from a single node to between 12 and 15 as you get 3 shards per gathering action.