Originally Posted by PSGarak

I'm speaking a bit in the theoretical at this point. You're right that shards abilities are not currently powerful. What I'm saying is that the reason soul shard abilities aren't powerful, is because we can bring a stash of forty of them to a fight. If shard abilities were powerful, there's too much difference in power between a lock with 4 shards and one with 40, so we would be required to farm 40 for every fight, which is silly. Given that we're allowed to have a large amount of shards, the only way out of this is simply that they don't do much, which is the situation we're in now: they have no optimal in-combat use, basicaly serving us only as a unique class-defining replacement for a priest's candles.

The only way out of this is to slap a Unique(5) on them. Soulshards can be allowed to be used in-combat for a damage boost IF the damage boost you get from them is capped. This means either restricting them with cooldowns (in which case the cooldown balances them anyways and the shards are just onerous), or restricting the number of shards you have altogether.

Being able to get them back in-combat is really just gravy but I'm personally a huge fan. In terms of restrictions, it means that it caps your DPS boost rather than your static damage boost. In terms of gameplay, it lets us ebb and flow our DPS, letting us burst in a much more organic manner than other classes' cooldown system.