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Special arrow levels are consumed by many things that don't actually make use of them. This is true for all arcane arrow skills that I tested with stone arrows, except the placement of cherry blossoms even when hitting an enemy with it. The annorum cherry blossom aoe does consume levels. Even regular spells outside of the ranger class are consuming special arrow levels while gaining nothing from them, when the bow is used as a casting tool while you have a special arrow buff. It's worth noting that attacks that hit multiple targets at once are consuming an arrow for every target, not that it matters when they're receiving no benefit anyway.