Ok I do not have a problem with astral shards being used to repair items in quests, used for re-specs and repairs as long as they do not take away the plat options we have now, this is no problem. Paying for convenience, fine with me.

However, I am a bit concerned with this:

Astral Shard repaired items can receive a temporary "Blessing of Moradin" (when in Forgotten Realms content) or "Blessing of Onatar" (when in Eberron content), which will apply a random beneficial effect to equipped armor, primary, and off-hand items.
This effect ends upon death or un-equipping the item.
Note that using an Astral Shard repair on an item subsequent times will apply a new random effect, over riding any existing one.
Runearms are not eligible for this effect since they do not take item damage.
If you repair an item with astral shards only it gets this temporary buff. First of all, that seems kind of weird. Why would you want to get a buff to your gear after repairing it, unless the buff has to do with it not breaking as much. Second of all, I really really really really hope these buffs do not become gamebreaking p2w buffs that force you to have to repair with astral shards.

Can a dev please clarify what these are? I tried going on the lammania test server to try this out, and neither the shards are in the DDO Store, nor can you buy astral diamonds and doubleclick on them to get astral shards. I also have no idea how to get these in game as well.

Thanks again for any clarification!