So we know about how Riot's gonna eventually revisit Morde

[{quoted}](name=Critmaster Garen,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=A1vOzT2F,comment-id=0000000000010001000000000000,timestamp=2016-08-13T17:45:14.070+0000)

i dont know, he just feels more reliable when hes good.

he doesnt have the pentakill potential of darius or illaoi, but at the same time he doesnt feel restricted to very specific scenarios to be effective, like they do.

on darius its easy to get kited and juked and denied your penta dunks pretty easily, even if you manage to trigger your passive. garen on the other hand is slightly less kitable and feels like has it a bit easier to follow up team engages and get where he needs to be.

i dont really want anything about his general playstile to change, and his villain passive is there to gve him reliable true damage so he can carry and take out particularly nasty adc, or other snowballing fighters like irelia or darius.

if anything is changed, then id rather see him scale harder into lategame, and tweaks to his vllain passive that it doesnt land on useless targets like the enemy support anymore.

but those changes wouldnt be on a the level of an actual rework, but general tweaks and number buffs.

Well, the issue with his villain marks is that you can't just say "If the enemy is Soraka, she can't be a villain". It'd be unfair to say "Whoever has the most kills is the villain" because that just means that person is subject to true damage ults until someone else has more kills than them, which is oppressive. The villain mechanic just needs to give a different reward outright instead of true damage, assuming it's kept.

As for his reliability, his insanely high reliability is the issue here. When it comes to risk/reward, higher reliability usually gets lesser reward, yet higher variance can be overcome with champion mastery. The result is that Garen is a more reliable champ, so he's decent in low elo, but he's still bad overall, so he's garbage in the higher ones...which is where balancing is based on. His current play style has nothing in it at all to miss or mess up, and that takes a toll on his overall power budget, which is the problem. Darius can fuck up his spin and his pull. Illaoi can fuck up nearly everything save like one spell. This is why it's easy for Riot to find a decent spot for balancing these champs, unlike others that have so little to play around that allowing them to be "kinda good" makes them too good. Tying this back into the Darius comparison: Darius serves as the "High single-target damage tanky dude running your whole team down", and Illaoi serves as the "AOE juggernaut slapping everyone at the same time"...literally what is Garen given this? A skilled Darius or Illaoi IS Garen and more, and that's the issue. Shutting down one person isn't a valuable niche, especially when that one person might accidentally be Blitzcrank.

If I were to see changes to Garen, first thing I'd wanna see is a change to his passive and his ability to sustain himself in fights. Other jugs have some dynamic in-fight sustain options, and Garen's sustain option is...Warmog's lite? Just buy Warmog's itself and it's more than enough...who cares about a passive that does like 1/4 of that? Could also give him an actual attack for his W or change his Q into something that isn't a guaranteed silencer dunk. Just something to make room for more reward for shutting down villains...maybe even allow the villain benefit to increase as the villain becomes a bigger threat. Something better than this though.