Foundations

Spellshards are used to craft player-made Grandmaster spells and combat arts. Grandmasters are the very best quality combat arts and spells one can get. As such, the harvested materials are among the rarest in EQ2 (as of early 2016).

Unlike items that are limited by your chosen craft, anyone who has taken up a trade can craft the grandmasters if they get a recipe and have the materials.

Obtaining Spellshards
The following holds true as of 2015:
 * The spellshards are no-trade, but the crafted adornments are heirloom.
 * They must be harvested by you. You will not' get them from the gathering goblin ability or the Artisan's Fully Trained Pack Pony.
 * Your harvesting skill does not impact the chance to get these; the higher the tier, the greater the rarity, and the more difficult they are to get.
 * Reports of testers in both beta and live shortly after these were released indicate that these are far beyond the pale of what most players consider a rare harvested material; it can take hours and hours and hours of harvesting and one may still come back with none of these from higher tier zones!
 * The recipes to make grandmasters are drops from adventuring, but they are extremely rare too.
 * To craft the actual grandmaster, you will also need 5 rares, 200 common materials, and 200 crafting fuel.

Fragments by Tier
These are harvested in zones along with all other crafting materials.
 * For help remembering which zone has materials from which tiers, see the Harvesting Timeline


 * T1 Nebulous foundation
 * T2 Aether foundation
 * T3 Phantom foundation
 * T4 Ethereal foundation
 * T5 Spectral foundation
 * T6 Visionary foundation
 * T7 Illusionary foundation
 * T8 Sacred foundation
 * T9 Voidstone foundation
 * T10 Prismatic foundation
 * T11 Transcendent foundation

Other Info

 * The adjacent items to make Grandmaster's are the Spellshards.
 * A similar set of items can be harvested that are also ultra rare are Primordial Fragments, which used to make Primordial Adornments.

Credits
These are often called ultra-rares (term coined by Naimi of Eq2 Trader's) due to the extremely rare chance one has to harvest them compared to normal rares used in all other crafted items. The above is a summary largely based on Naimi's info at EQ2 Traders.