Found out something interesting and not sure if it's intentional or not. If you wield a ranged weapon or item that applies effects on enemies, like the giantslayer crossbow (applies reeling for 2 turns) and/or gloves of power (chance to apply bane on hit), you can use the elemental AOE arrows to hit multiple foes at once and apply the reeling and potentially bane conditions to all of them. This is pretty powerful especially considering the AOE elemental arrows are considered attack actions so a martial class at lvl 5 can fire two of them in a normal turn. Assuming the user is wielding the giantslayer crossbow you can spread reeling to a massive part of the field.
I do wonder though if this was intentional or an oversight. I wonder that because the ranger spell hail of thorns functions somewhat similarly to the AOE arrows, but it only applies effects like reeling to the primary target. Though it seems to register as two attacks on the primary target who receives 4 stacks of reeling, instead of the usual 2.
If the AOE arrows triggering item effects was an intentional choice then I personally think hail of thorns should be made to do the same. It's a spell that requires an attack action, a spell slot, and a bonus action to use. That's a massive amount of resources to use compared to an AOE arrow that's easy to find,cheap, consumes less action resources, and will spread debuffs to enemies.
I've only tested the AOE arrows and hail of thorns. I'm curious has anyone encountered AOE that when using items like the bane gloves procs those conditions on enemies?
