Unorthodox Combat Mechanics, Rulebook Nazi Anathema Options

[Trucido]

I find that in the world of Shadow Run combat can sometimes get tiresome, or repetitive. Sometimes everything can be solved with an assault rifle, some APDS rounds, and good recoil compensation. In order to make up for this, when I GM I like to include some interesting mechanics and qualities to the opposition.
To some GMs this makes me the anti-christ. I've played with a couple of GMs who swear by the source books like the bible. I find that I can't do that, not because I feel like it makes the game stale necessarily (not that I don't either). It's more or less that I'm too lazy to A) memorize it and B) Check the scatter chart everytime someone fires a grenade.
This causes a bit of trouble sometimes, but it also allows me to create my own rules without fear of them infringing on the book because I don't know WHAT the book says about it. So I was wondering if anyone else has any interesting tweaks to combat that they've added.
For instance, I've created a two different sets of enemies for my next with two seperete mechanics. The first of which are tower shield wielding swordsmen. The mechanic? 1d6, 4 and under and they deflect any ranged combat attack taken against them. This is because I've found that the melee characters in my group are often sent to the back of the lines so the full autoers can take charge.
The bullies, the other set, have a mechanic called "Bullet Sponge". Basically, they have a reaction of 1, but they take half damage. Eating bullets like candy. Sure it'll make combat a bit more challenging. But it would make a character alot more intimidating if they took a bullet to the brain and grinned back at the party. These mechanics are never intended to be used BY the players.

What do you think?