What they really should do is just bring back the random drop amount per node. Even sitting down to smelt 50 ingots eats up a huge chunk of shards, and then you compound the time you already spent mining for those ingots by doubling back and needing to spend another two to three hours recouping the shard loss. Should you have gone ahead and mined the shards with the ore, the time's still spent, and seems mildly retarded in the concept.

My better suggestion would be to make the Wards a toggle ability if they don't want to randomize the shards per node.