MMORPG info has some clean and concise charts showing shard gear by class including shard price - across all sets - check it out

LINK

Another great resource at Alla's wiki

LINK

In essence it costs about 38 shards for full set (6) of T1 armor. Then T1 armor + more shards = tier2. Then T2 armor + mold (from epic x2 zones) + more shards = T3 gear which is fabled.

Also the tier2 armor introduces the all important critical mit stat necessary for TSO raiding.

This is old news for most I know but for me just getting rolling again it is now making some sense :)