What I am asking is for you to be clear that what your doing it different in the stat block. Tag your monsters as "elite" or "paragon" or whatever. Then there is no confusion that you are doing something different. It is really as simple as that. For example, in my
5e Updates: Monstrous Compendium in the D&D forum I have two types of monsters that bend the rules a bit. So a tag them "Champion" & "Elite." Like this:
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The elite tag tells you clearly this is not a standard 5e stat block. Then you can go find out what the tag means and you understand the differences and can plan accordingly. Something like that is what I am suggesting.