7.1: Burning gem animation too slow and prevents casting spells

Bug Reports
1

Platform, device version and operating system:

iOS

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:

I play on 4x speed. When I match burning gems, they very quickly shoot over to the enemy troops. Wheh the enemy matches burning gems, the gems take a much longer time to shoot over to my troops, and while that animation is ongoing I can’t take my next turn by casting a spell.

Technically this is two different issues. The animation should not block spell casting, and it should be operating at 4x speed no matter whether the enemy or I make the match.

How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?

I didn’t notice this until this weekend. It might be new to 7.1. It’s been very noticeable because of the new bounty troop.

Steps to make it happen again

  1. Set animation speed to 4x.
  2. Play any battle with a troop who creates burning gems.
  3. Create burning gems and wait for one of your troops to be charged.
  4. When an enemy matches/destroys burning gems, observe that the animation is too slow. While it’s happening, try to cast a spell from a charged troop. The Cast button is disabled during the ridiculously long animation.

ALSO I STILL HAVE MISSING TROOP GRAPHICS AND MY RECENT BUG REPORT HAS NOT BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED.

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1 - Every time it the game is waiting on your input, it slows down to 1x. This includes when it’s (obviously) your turn, but also when selecting a manual target for a spellcast.
2 - Historically there have been issues where “traveling” Heroic Gems (e.g. Burning Gems) cause a troop to get de-listed from the pool of eligible targets for a spell, which occasionally led to total softlocks when no other target was available. This is why they tweaked it so that you can’t spellcast until the travel finishes (but this actually didn’t fix the underlying issue).
3 - The game can still switch turns while a Heroic Gem is traveling, causing certain effects to be processed out of (intuitive) sequence. For example, if you match a Burning Gem cascading into a Skull match with a Pyromania troop (2x damage to Burning targets) then whether or not you get the Pyromania bonus depends on whether the Burning Gem has finished its travel across the board when the Skulls fall into place. (Similarly, Spirit Gems can actually fail to prevent an opponent from casting on their turn if the game switches turns with the Gem still traveling)

So yes, there are actually several things wrong here.

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It definitely shouldn’t slow down to 1x for my turn; there’s no reason for it to do so, and it slows down my play. They need to fix that.

Even if the problem with waiting on the animation can’t be helped (for now), there’s no excuse for making it take longer to finish.

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I need to add to this that when my wife tested this, she observed the animation time appears to depend on the number of gems, where a larger number of matches greatly increases the time it takes. So it might not be a question of me vs. the enemy making the match, but how many gems.

That longer animation is absolutely untenable behavior, especially because it causes the unacceptable problem of delaying my casts. Surely it should be the case that casts are allowed, and animations can simply be ended prematurely.

Edit: Nope, it isn’t even strictly the number. Sometimes the gems split into more gems during animation, but I can’t find a rhyme or reason as to the longer times. Whatever it is, it needs to be fixed.