Ice Shards Feedback ~ Fun mines, poor direct, poor coverage

Ice shards is extremely fun to use as miniature land mines with the xbow, however I think a bit TOO much damage was put into the secondary damage over the primary.

Trying to ever directly fire this skill at enemies has horrible damage output, to the point of a full clip only dealing 108% of your listed attack damage ONCE at gem level 9. With only a 6% increased attack speed my current bolt per second is 0.09 , that's quite literally 1% damage per 100 miliseconds as a 1 second : 100% damage ratio on direct hit damage.

I would request that the bonus damage for shards be halved and the base damage be doubled, shifting output so its a bit more practical to fire at enemies.

Second there's a limit of 12 shards on the ground at a time and yet has a recommendation to use scattershot. This is only practical if we fire the skill 4 times then switch to a different bolt type, as the direct damage is negligible and the damage loss per individual bolt on the ground feels much greater than the gain of planting the shards faster.

Fork is also recommended for this skill which I can't currently comprehend considering how poor direct hits are and the projectiles then literally go wide instead of near the enemy to plant shards.

The limit of 12 also means we can't really carpet spread the ground too much outside of a single volley.

TLDR Please:
1) Move half of shard bonus damage to base damage
2) Increase shard count
3) Change how fork works with this skill to make it target the nearby ground, planting ice shards instead of firing wildly