[{quoted}](name=True Garen,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=7cGEEsXs,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2019-09-12T23:43:08.706+0000)
It's %40 MISSING HP. There's a difference.
Some counterplay options: Don't be alone. Get a Guardian Angel. (You're carrying, right?)
Actually, one way to lose the stigma, is if somebody else on your team gets more kills.
You won't lose the stigma if you die, unless Garen killed you.
The ability will not complete if the target moves out of Garen's vision or it becomes untargetable. The spell itself has a pretty close range; Garen has to practically be right on top of you to use his Ultimate.
Garen is pretty much a late-game champion now. He's not too difficult to play around, in general. This Villain thing is the ONLY thing that Garen has going for him after lvl 16.
You laned against Garen, and beat him up and down the lane, so he had to build tank. Now you're fed and carrying. It seems unfair to you, that you got fed laning against a champion with a weak early game, and now he might situationally be able to execute you in the late game.
(I assume; I can't find a recent match for you vs Garen at all...)
I was playing Jax. Supposedly scales even better than Garen does. He couldn't even damage me and i was practically 3-shotting him - problem is his Zac flash-ulted me which applied a 0.5 second knockup, which was enough time for Garen to run at me, spin for half a second and ult me.
"Is if somebody else on your team gets more kills."
Yeah. In low diamond solo queue. Depending on teammates to be able to carry me. Right.
See, here's the thing. There's still no counterplay of my own here. All of these strategies depend entirely on my teammates playing around me and Garen. Random strangers that i have never met before and likely will never meet again. That's the biggest problem for top laners.
If i don't carry, nobody does. If the enemy team manages to kill me, my team loses the fight. There is an exception to this perhaps once every 20 or 30 matches, and that's it. I've been forced to begin playing hypercarries like Jax, Kayle, Pantheon and Fiora rather than my preferred tanky front liners Darius, Urgot and Sion because of this.
People take the game too seriously in ranked. Ironically, i am a lot more likely to get carried playing normal games because my teammates aren't so terrified of losing that they forget how to fight.
Guardian angel seems the only viable option, and even then that's not counterplay. It still means i not only have to devote an item slot to an inefficient item for my champion and the enemy team comp, it also means i will effectively be forced to play the teamfight at 30% health. Once. Then i have to survive four minutes before i can teamfight again.
Oh, and not going alone against Garen? As a Garen main you should know perfectly well how Garen can literally walk past the entire enemy team to get to his target, especially if his target is a front liner. Garen wasn't capable of damaging me, but he could 3-shot any one of my squishier teammates with his spin alone. Black cleaver and Sterak's gage will do that.
His ultimate would be fine if it dealt magic damage - then at least i can itemize it. But % max HP / missing HP true damage? If you do not have invulnerability or a spell shield, you will die no matter what. It's not a skillshot and it doesn't require stacking up like Darius's ult - Garen clicks R while hovering the mouse over you and you're dead. This was fine when Garen was initially reworked as a lot of champions were actually tanky at the time, but in today's meta everyone's getting bursted down in a second or less - defense items and health is a lot less impactful before and it essentially turns Garen into a full tank assassin. You know, the kind of full tank assassin that Ekko and Fizz were playing in top lane a couple years ago, and got essentially gutted with reworked AP ratios to counteract.
I understand that you feel loyal to your main champion but his true damage execute is just way too much. There's 0 counterplay from the individual. You can't build around it, you can't play around it, you can't do anything against it. If you are your team's primary front line, then you have lost the game the instant you are marked villain by Garen. Your team depends on you to be able to compete with the opposing players. Garen's villain mark means you can't even join in fights anymore because he can just tunnel vision on you from the get-go. At least similar champions like Pyke can actually miss their ults. Garen can't.
For the record i had around 2500 health (with a sterak's gage) and around 220 armor and magic resist. Garen's ult did 1400 true damage, bypassing the Sterak's gage shield entirely, without even activating it. I was also mid-counterstrike so none of his right clicking teammates could actually damage me at the time.
or 
so there was never any counterplay. My team lost the teamfight and the entire game that we had been steamrolling from the very beginning because Garen (full tank) ignored everyone else and went directly for me, ulting me the instant my health dropped to 80% and killing me immediately. 1400 true damage.