If Gouki is accurate then yes Doomskulls won’t effect Spawners. Cyrup clarified a lot after I expressed that concern. I saw it as a new gem type at the time that would lower the chances of an extra turn match. As @Slypenslyde was saying.
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If she answered all these question, does it mean the update is closer then we think? 
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The update is next week. So it’s as close as I think it’ll be. Lol
Devs won’t confirm it until like a hour before official release.
While we wait we can watch that gif
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Salty’s stream on Monday will preview the pets more.
It looks like there will be at least 12 pets though according to the GIF.
I was trying to read the pet name under but the pic is blured
It says “purple loot pet”… So whoever said pets can come from Gnomes was accurate.
Btw…(sorry it’s not about Doom skulls)
But it looks like PC/Mobile are finally getting daily tasks! 
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Yeah, there’s no dev promise, but some careful thought makes it seem pretty close.
The updates have been more or less 2 months apart for the last few updates. One could point out some were one month apart but if we do the archaeology we’ll see those were periods where a lot of known issues demanded very fast fixes, and “double time” is definitely “fast”.
It’s been about 2 months since the last update. That means we’re probably due.
Also: historically speaking, we don’t tend to get any kind of spoiler or teaser related to an update until it’s within a couple of weeks of being finished. (My guess is they only like to give us spoilers if they’re using somewhat final QA builds.)
So while we have no official confirmation, I agree with awryan and expect an update sometime before the end of the month.
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I think a dev did say in a stream (I read the notes) that 3.4 “should” be out before May.
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We want the pets and we want them now!
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*Pets your hair.*
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From what I can glean from information given, it looks like they implemented Doomskulls as an 8th gem type, and went back and retroactively changed the way some of the spells functioned under the hood as well as hardcoding some new match mechanics.
Just a hypothetical here, but this is how it may be implemented:
Lets assume, just as an example, each gem is denoted as an integer and stored on a table representing the board, with 0-5 being mana types, 6 being skulls, and 7 being doomskulls. So, when a spell uses the “boosted by” modifier and checks the board, they simply changed those spells to count 6 and 7 instead of just 6. They also had to alter the match mechanics so that 6’s match with both 6 and 7, and 7 matches with both 7 and 6, and whatever their “on_match” function is to make doomskulls explode after resolved (hopefully only after all matches are resolved). If you spawn 7, you spawn 7, and if you spawn 6 you spawn 6. But it seems they didn’t change the spawn overwrite mechanics, so if you spawn 6, it can overwrite 7, and 7 can overwrite 6. As seen by how long the console guardian fix took, what is considered fit to overwrite and not may not be something that is easy to change and is probably already too late to be changed for this patch, if ever. But spells that currently have a targeting restriction of “only 6” can hopefully just be hotpatched to “6 and 7” (maybe they already are, based on @Cyrup’s second response?) - it depends on if they have to create an entirely new targeting type to do so, because they can switch between existing targeting types and effects without a client patch.
As for how they drop on the board, they should appear about 10 percent as often as other skulls. Meaning 10% of the drop chance of 6 is instead a 7. Since 6 matches with 7 and 7 matches with 6, there are still a total of 7 distinct categories of things that can match, and they should still have the same balance as before. Just random skull spawners can overwrite very slightly more gems on the board than they could before and doomskull spawners can overwrite nearly all the gems on the board under normal circumstances, which is the outlier in behavior.
I could be totally wrong here, and all gems are implemented as objects, and one each objects’ properties is a boolean for “doom” and only skulls can be set to true, and only under certain circumstances, but then some of the interactions wouldn’t seem like they would work as outlined (skulls wouldn’t overwrite other skulls, since the overwrite code would be marking those spots as invalid unless they added another snippet to specifically check the “doom” flag to force overwrites). The former is a lot simpler if they don’t have a lot of cross matching going on (which, at the moment, and from the beginning state of the game, they don’t).
tl;dr: It looks like they are a different gem type made to function close to “all doomskulls are skulls, but not all skulls are doomskulls”. But not quite.
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hugs the fellow pony
Hmmm interesting look like there is a rescue event with limited time, you and your guild need to work together
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I really, really hope not. It looks more likely that anyone that spawns a pet rescue event has that same event accessible to the rest of their guild and themselves for about one hour. There are still some huge issues with this implementation (not just from the system as a whole, but from their implementation of it) which I’ll go over later if this happens to be the case. Suffice to say, I don’t really think this game needs another activity hook.
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Im just curious about how much it will cost to rescue the pet and if everyone in the guild win it, even if they couldn’t play during that time
Since im less interested in raid and invasion, as long as this event is fun, i don’t mind if it cost 200-300 gems to unlock a pet
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It’s there since ages (at least 3.3).
I’m not a big fan of the “1-hour” limit. Living in Asia, most of my guildmembers are active when I’m sleeping…
I really hope that devs did it rightly and start the timer at the 1st login…
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…which better not be tied to ANOTHER Gem sink. Thanks in advance.