Following negative community feedback, Blizzard have decided to remove the recently introduced artifacts from the game after just under two weeks. 

Artifacts were introduced to Heroes' technical alpha on July 21st with the intention to provide players with another form of progression system within the game other than the talent system. Similar to League of Legends' runes, Heroes' artifacts were bought and upgraded with in-game currency to fit one of three artifact slots for a character.

By design, artifacts were meant to provide a flat percentage bonus to certain stats. These included bonus health, shield, faster respawn time, faster attack speed, reduced cooldown, better health regeneration and so forth, again very similar to League's runes or pre-Pandaria World of WarCraft talents. 

There came community's problems with the entire system. Looking at the aforementioned pre-Pandaria WoW talents, those were remade precisely because they allowed for cookie-cutter - or mathematically optimal - builds, essentially limiting players' options instead of giving them more. Similar problem exists in League of Legends to this day, where a hero played in a certain position or role has to pack nothing but the established cookie-cutter combination to be viable and useful to his team.

In addition, the way artifacts were designed - i.e. providing flat, upgradable bonuses to stats - was also perceived as something negative. With artifact slots unlockable and upgradable with in-game gold, this automatically meant that people with more time to play the game would be statistically better that those without the opportunity to farm up their artifacts gear. The system created an uneven playing field in that way.


TotalBiscuit comments on the artifact system

The amount of in-game gold players had to sink into the artifact system in order to stay competitive was another issue. Unlocking an artifact cost 100 gold and every new level of the same artifact required 100 gold extra: 100 from level 1 to leve 2, 200 from level 2 to level 3, and so on, or 5,600 gold in total to unloack a single artifact and upgrade it to level 10. With 14 artifacts available and with new slots also requiring gold, it all totaled up to more than 80,000 gold for everything.

Combined with the fact that gold is also needed to unlock heroes and the painfully slow gold progression (40 for a win, 10 for a loss, 200 per daily quest), this meant countless hours of grinding for Heroes players with no real fun incentive involved other than unlocking a new level of their gem artifact. Understandably, the negative posts on community boards stayed there for days.

Following this backlash, Blizzard announced recently that the artifact system is now gone as they agreed that the "issues started to outweigh the benefits of the system". Accoring to the announcement post on Battle.net, the Heroes team currently has no concrete plans on if the system will be reworked or replaced with another one altogether.