Level 5 hero abilities?

I tried searching under this topic, but couldn't find anything, the minimum search term length didn't help, ugh.

I'm reffering ofcourse to the bug:
Taking Summon Water Elemental for arguments sake, and wanting to summon exactly 1 WE, which is the default value for lvl5, thus making it not WORK.

So far I have figured out two ways to get around it.

Method 1:
Make 2 triggers, one to detect and record Summon WE level, the other to detect when lvl5 WE is cast, and manually create a WE of the desired type, and manually add the expiration timer. Works great, and is mostly a C'n'P job to make it work for other abilities.
Method 2:
Take another ability, such as Summon Sea Elemental, which does not have 1 as default for lvl5, and basically copy-paste all the data from Summon Water Elemental. This requires no special triggers (making it good for exporting or whatever), but is a big *** copy-paste job compared to Method1 and probably bloats the map more (longer load times), but may run faster.

I'm perfectely happy to use Method1 to fix the broken level5 abilities, but I wonder if there are other ways to get around this bug?

Personally, I tend to use options likes method two.

Another variant would be to allow Summon Water Elemental to summon two Water elementals, but remove one of them from the game immediately.