Since I still don't see the appearance of a Gameplay general suggestions forum in the Feedback section, I'll post here, for as much good as that might do.

From a crafting and gathering standpoint, we either need to have the ability to toggle Wards as permanent while gathering, or have the random drops re-introduced into nodes as they were in 1.0.

The time consumption is just too great for gathering these, when paired with the time it takes gathering the materials necessary for synthing a block of items. Even with the occasional triple or quadruple gathering node after using a Ward, you'll be gathering shards for the same amount of time if not twice as much (due to the amount of shards and crystals used on higher-level recipes).