
HammerJack |
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You could do it. The advice in the Bestiary is that you usually shouldn't. If you keep going with it, you'll get numbers out of whack with the level and possibly special abilities that PCs around the level you've adjusted to are NOT prepared for, if you're going downward.
For an adjustment of a larger number of levels, just building a new creature is probably a better call.

Unicore |

The danger is higher for trying to weaken a much to powerful foe for your party to fight, as they will likely have a couple extra +1s built in there that the weak adjustment won't pick up. I can't imagine it will be too much of a problem the other way except that the creature might be a little weaker than you think it is going to be.

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I would never advise applying these more than twice to the same creature and even then you should only do this if you're in a rush and do not have time to build the creature/NPC the intended way from scratch such as having to cook something up on the fly when your party goes off rails and you gotta improvise.

Castilliano |

The adjustments are for tweaking, not building. They're even a bit on the high side to account for not adding/subtracting abilities, so the numbers get way off the power curve fairly fast.
As Hammerjack noted, it's often better to start new if adjusting too many levels. You can see the difference in the many Xulgath variants (or Orcs, Hobgoblins, Ogres, etc.). Those aren't mere differences in numbers, and many of those abilities wouldn't balance outside the creature's level range (either up or down). Or look at how a Troll King is way more than merely a Troll w/ bigger numbers.
Creatures are expected to gain new, better abilities as they level up much like a PC Fighter might go from Knockdown to Improved Knockdown (though that's a whopping 6 level difference). And some monster abilities don't show up until higher levels. Often these involve action-economy, like a Medusa's gaze being 1-action vs. a Basilisk's at 2, or Improved Grab showing up later when giving up an action becomes that much more costly for the grabber (because their other action options are that much better). A Roc gets it fairly early at 9 because that's their shtick, but it's not a regular ability until several levels later.
Some of the monster templates can be useful as guides for adding powers, though I can't think offhand of any guides for lessening/subtracting powers when weakening a creature except borrowing a similar creature and reskinning it.

Captain Morgan |

Generally your best bet is to grab the GMG and look at the stat block. Figure out what benchmarks the monster hit for its original level and adjust to that point for the new level. So if the monster had a high fortitude for level 3, give it a high fortitude for level 7. If the same monster had poor perception for level 3, give it poor perception at level 7. At higher levels you start increasing a couple of stats that were high to extreme.
Then you just need to pick another ability or 3 to tack. Higher level spells can suffice for casters, and you can pick from the bestiary or player options for martial stuff.

Staffan Johansson |
Basically, higher-level monsters tend to have abilities that are stronger not just numerically but also qualitatively (does more impactful things, better action economy, and so on). This isn't captured by weak/elite, so they are a little bigger than you'd guess just from the creature building rules.
For example, from level 3 to 8, a "default" creature gains 8 points of AC (high), 7 points in their saves, and 8 points of attack bonus (high). That's about 1.5 per level, but elite/weak rounds that up to 2 to compensate for the other stuff that usually happens.

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Yeah, what Staffan and others said - Elite boosts numbers more than a +1 level normally would, to account for not actually adding more abilities.
But if you do that more than once or maaaaybe twice, you end up with numbers that are much higher than normal, and you basically end up with "boring OP monster" that doesn't do anything except just crit PCs very often while being too hard to hit/cast spells on.