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Garen's Kit Issues, and How it Limits His Itemization

Manchette·7/14/2014, 8:05:26 AM·1 votes·1,057 views

When I first started playing League, I picked up Garen and immediately loved him. His kit felt fun and rewarding, especially since it was easy to learn about how to build a tank with his naturally tank-friendly kit.

However, as I continued to play him, I realized that there were some choices which no one, including myself, ever made to build Garen with. As some people may know, Garen's Q and E can both critically strike, which is actually a pretty powerful bonus to his kit. Unfortunately, this is also counter-intuitive to our Demacian friends nature as an off-tank fighter.

Why would someone want a bonus to his critical strike chance, when he would never build it? So I attempted to answer the question myself - and found out almost immediately.

Since Garen's E deals damage (roughly) every second in an area of effect, building attack speed - something which goes hand in hand with critical strike chance - would make that ability more of a detriment than a value. His overall damage per second would drop because his attack speed would hit the enemy faster than his E would when he used it.

This is probably why no one would build a Wit's End on him, even though it would synergize wonderfully with his ult. This is also why no one would build Static Shiv or Phantom Dancer either.

This reveal of information led me to wonder how the problem could be remedied, and I came up with a solution:

Allow Garen's E to scale with attack speed.

As an example, if Garen has (x) attack speed, his E hits (y) more times. In order to keep one ability from having too much power, the "movement through units" perk on his E could be removed. Maybe something else? Just a suggestion.

This would add an additional role to Garen, which is what I wanted convey as a possibility from the start. Not only could he be built as a tank, but as a dedicated fighter as well.

In summary; I have felt that Garen is limited by his awkward kit, and having his E scale with attack speed in some way could help remedy that. I'm not sure if this would make him super powerful, but it would open up a secondary build path for players to follow.

3 Comments

CaptainWednesday7/14/2014, 2:12:05 PM2 votes

If there's a Garen discussion, I'm there. As noobish as it is to say, I main Garen.

Now, let's talk about your OP. You say that being able to critically strike is counter intuitive on a tank-fighter. That's simply not true. Tank-fighters such as Nocturne, Irelia, Poppy, Gangplank, Jax, Wukong, heck even Warwick could benefit from Crit Chance, even more so with Trinity Force. That being said, there are plenty of tank-fighters that can benefit from a bit of crit chance, with Garen included.

You said why we would want Critical Strike Chance in the crit built into his kit if you would never build it. It's actually very easy to build it on Garen, and I will describe that later in this reply.

Let's go ahead and clear this up right now. Around 90% of Garen's damage comes from his Q->E combo, not from basic attacks. That's why smart Garen players never build Attack Speed. You're saying that you could remedy this as if it's an issue. It is not. Garen's Q & E are powerful abilities that scale from his total Attack Damage. Building AD is much more important than Attack Speed.

Letting Garen's E scale with Attack Speed so it would invite more Critical Chance items is counter intuitive. By building more Attack Speed and Critical Chance, you end up weakening your overall damage and becoming much less tanky.

The only Critical Strike items you should ever build on Garen are Infinity Edge, Atma's Impaler, or Youmuu's Ghostblade. Infinity Edge ramps your AD by a whopping 80, increases your Critical Strike Chance, and ups your crit damage which in turn powers up your Q->E combo. Atma's provides a little less AD and a little less Critical Strike Chance for a nice chunk of Armor, which is then increased by Garen's W. Again, Atma's does not sacrifice Garen's Q->E combo and synergizes well with his total AD scaling and tankiness. The Ghostblade is a bit of stretch, but it can definitely work. It gives you much needed AD, Critical Strike Chance, CDR, Armor Pen, and the nice active to use in between your Q->E combo. These three items provide Garen with much needed stats without becoming completely reliant upon basic attacks. I declined to mention Trinity Force for a number of reasons:

  • Mana and Ability Power are wasted stats (~1201 gold spent on Spellblade passive alone)
  • Grants Attack Speed, a nearly wasted stat on Garen
  • Very expensive, weakens your laning phase where Garen shines

Not to destroy your idea, but your analysis on Garen is a bit off. Garen is a tank-fighter who relies on his abilities to do a majority of his damage, not his basic attacks. Instead of basic Critical Strike Chance being counter-intuitive, building Attack Speed on Garen is truly counter-intuitive.

Sire Hippington7/14/2014, 2:32:50 PM1 votes

There are quite some items that have critical strike and benefit garem greatly, like item 3031 ,item 3005 ,item 3142 oritem 3078 .
Since his E procs damage on aoe and every 0.5sec, u don't need a high critchance to have a relative reliable dmg boost, so a single crit item already helps ur damage alot.
As-scaling on E wouldn't fir his style, buliding as on a big guy in huge armor with an even bigger sword would seem strange, and it would throw off his balace as E would need to be weaker without bonus as than now, so u kinda would need crit, as, ad, probably arpen and since u are a not very mobile melee, u also need some tankstuff, would be quite hard to itemize.
also, his Q doesn't crit, the AA wich procs the Q can, but the bonusdamage of the Q doesn't get increased by crit.
Garren also got a good scaleing with cdr, arpen and ad, so item 3071 is pretty perfect, and item 3035 can help alot aswell. that would be 6 viable off-items for garren, wouldn't call that a limited itemization for an off-tank

hachiman7/15/2014, 4:18:15 AM1 votes

Don't make Garen any more complicated. His kit is made for beginners to easily understand the game and the champion