Ever since the announcement that ammunition will no longer be consumed and that hunters will gaining their quiver/ammo pouch haste bonus through other means, freeing up a slot for another bag, warlocks have been wishing that they might get a similar treatment. They are indeed getting some help with their soul shards but it's not in the form of removing the shards altogether or going to free up a bag slot either. Soul shard farming isn't a thing of the past but it's going to get a whole lot easier and faster.
Soul shards are getting easier to get and easier to manage with the following changes in patch 3.1:
* Drain Soul: Each time Drain Soul deals damage to a target which can grant experience, it now has a chance to generate a Soul Shard.
* Soul Shard: This item now has a maximum count of 32 in inventory.
The first change all fun, making it possible to get shards while wiping on boss fights and much easier to get shards in trash fights. It seems though like the second one isn't great at all, especially if you're used to running around with more shards than that. Ghostcrawler has an explanation and it's all part of making shard management easier.
Drain Soul will produce enough shards that you should never be without them. Even if you are learning a boss through repeated wiping, you should be able to get the new shards you need each attempt.
In fact, it produces so many shards that we figured you'd end up having to delete them constantly, which would be annoying. The 32 limit will fill up your largest bag (which only holds shards anyway) without spilling over into the rest of your inventory. We figured very few locks carried around a lot more shards than that, and like I said, they are easy enough to replace now for those of you who do manage to go through them quickly. source
So basically warlocks will be getting shards out of their ears so it's just best that they put a cap to it. they figure it's more convenient to just grab the shards you need rather than having to get rid of the ones that could fill up all your bags. It's a sound reasoning especially if your factor the minor glyph, glyph of drain soul which has a chance of giving you an extra shard! What I'm wondering though is that with this change, locks will have to cast drain soul even boss fights if you're running low on shards so how will this practice affect their rotation? It might not be much of a big deal but it's something that has to be asked.