Welcome back, I was willing to bet this would drop off the radar.
You are not looking at the correct spot.
What is shown in the videos
In both videos, there’s just one opponent troop left, which doesn’t have the Burning status effect. The player matches Burning gems, which apply Burning to the opponent troop, directly followed by a cascading skull hit. Burning gems have a fancy animation showing which targets they cause to burn, the game only updates the status effect afterwards. In the first video, the game finishes the animation fast enough, the target is Burning when it receives the skull hit. In the second video, the game is still busy with the animation, the target isn’t Burning when it receives the skull hit.
How to see what is going on
What you need to look out for is the text “Pyromania” plopping up on the topmost troop on the left side when dealing skull damage. That’s the indicator that the Pyromania trait, dealing double damage to Burning targets, has activated.
Isn’t this actually working as intended? The Burning gems haven’t hit the target yet!
Definitely not. Gems of War isn’t an action game, events are supposed to happen in sequence, no matter how long a screen update takes. In the videos above, the first event is matching Burning gems, followed by a second event, a cascading skull match. The animation is just visual fluff, the outcome has to be the same, even if your device might render some things a bit slower.
This isn’t the first issue with special gem animations. Some older bug reports, there are probably more:
- Game locks up in battle
- Stuck on enemy select without a valid enemy
- Burning gem causes targeting softlock
- Lycanthropy Gem caused softlock when spellcasting vs. single opponent
So far the duct tape fixes only seem to have introduced multiple follow-up issues. I’m not really confident the next attempt will be any more successful. Maybe entirely removing the animation, as proposed by @DracoL1ch, could finally make this work properly?