Thanks for the response!
Good criticisms. A few things I might do to combat those downsides:
Perhaps have the enemy cleanse/buff stripping on cooldowns to reduce the player-base anti cleanse build response. As for skipping the mobs, that’s mostly ok imo. To dissuage people from always skipping them though you could have them spawn more along side rares and especially bosses - perhaps even moreso in monolith/other endgame stuff.
Also, instead of a simple cleanse you could have the mob aoe cleanse and “shield” the targeted mobs from cleansed effects for a time to further the impact of these enemies if need be.
In the case of damage type immune enemies, maybe they are only immune to a set amount of damage from that type. Once you exceed the threshold their immunity “breaks” and they become vulnerable for a time. Unless you want to encourage multi-damage type builds (or further mob skipping) that is.
You could have more abilities like the void knights skill that removes enemies from the field for a few seconds, that way you “sap” the hexing mob while you clear out the others. Stuff like that to promote builds that don’t focus purely damage.
The point is not necessarily to remove the strength of top tier builds, but to use enemy types and affixes as a balancing tool in addition to nerfs/buffs so that the majority of builds can feel equally powerful and equally exposed to their “nemesis” enemy types overall. That way instead of removing build viability via flat nerfs, it should actually increase build diversity when done correctly.
There could be other downsides I haven’t thought of; keep commenting folks - lets see if this suggestion has a place in Last Epoch.