As far as I know they wanted to fix the damage-multiplier effect in patch 1.07, but ran into some other issues testing this particular fix.
So they apparently decided to delay and tweak this bug-fix for some time (hopefully only till 1.08). At least there is some post by one the developers on this ... somewhere.
So right now the shards only seem to affect the essence of your units (10% increase for each controlled shard) and allow you to cast certain high-level spells that have a "you need one XY shard"-restriction.
Rabenhoff
