QoL Change To Garen's Villain Mechanic + Let's Have a Discussion About What Garen Needs

Quoted from the 7.14 Patch Notes:

Garen provides his opponents with a healthy amount of counterplay as his opponents learn to kite. This leaves Garen with not that much skill expression of his own, making the “skill” in “skill matchup” pretty one-sided. We’re giving Courage a skill check to make Garen a little less straightforward, letting the beastliest Garens flex their muscles and show off. While we were on Garen, we took this opportunity to modernize his passive by shifting it from a 3-tier model to one that transforms once around the end of laning phase.

All in all, we still think there’s more that can be done to make Garen more compelling in the future, so take these changes as the start of a larger Garen conversation.

I thought I might aswell start that conversation.

So after reading this I actually went to play some matches with him. I'm currently leveling up this account and with all the high base stats he has ( which make him less dependant on runes and masteries than other champions ), the recent buffs and the overall easiness of playing him makes him a really good champion to climb up the first few levels.

What I noticed though is that the more complex your matchups get and the more your enemy can find out about your limitations, the harder it is to play him. For example, after securing my dominance in lane against a Yasuo, he quickly realized how he should fight me - not by actively going in and poking me like he can do against a lot of other champions but running circles around me and keeping me at a distance. This got especially efficient once he got his Frozen Mallet.

This might seem obvious at first and like something that could be applied to every champion but I think it counts double as much for Garen. When you find out the weaknesses of Yasuo there are still ways to exploit them, but it's much easier for him to counteract these weaknesses with sheer player skill and by just farming up and relying on his late game spikes. For Garen, this is much harder to do. To make plays with him, you can't just rely on your skill alone - you need your enemy to fuck up big time and then explot these mistakes. It is rather easy to keep Garen at a distance or kite him around but if you went in just a bit too close or you found yourself facechecking the wrong bush - you WILL be screwed.

And this is where most of his problems lie imo. This relying-on-enemy-mistakes-to-make-plays kind of playstyle makes him devastating in lower skill levels where people make a lot of mistakes while making him too predictable to be a good pick when your enemy has a higher skill level and knows what you are about.

This means that straight out buffing him is never really a good idea. It will just make him even more devastating in lower elos while not changing a lot about what he can do in higher levels of play, because his crippling weaknesses will still be the same no matter how much you change his numbers.

And that in turn means that if you want to do something about that, you have to be more delicate with it. Instead of just shifting numbers, some of his core mechanics need to be changed to allow him to be able to rely more on his own skill level rather than his enemies screwing up. In short, the changes that Garen needs have to add some depth and mastery to his abilities so that he isn't just a more easy to play and more predictable Darius, while at the same time not changing him too much to the point where he isn't Garen anymore.

The changes to his W were a great start. Instead of just being a "press-this-button-and-be-more-tanky" ability, it now has to be activated with more care. The damage reduction is much higher in the first few seconds while being lower in the last few seconds and you also get an instant tenacity boost. This makes it an ability you have to actually think about and that adds another layer of skill and depth to Garen - you shouldn't just use it at the beginning of every fight to be more tanky, you should think about specific abilities like executes that you want to reduce the damage of ( similar to how you quick-cast Yi's meditate to reduce damage ) aswell as abilities you know are going to lock you up for a long time if you don't W them, like a Morgana Q.

But there still is a lot more that could be done. I thought about a change to his Villain Mechanic on his ultimate, because currently, I really dislike it. Here is what it does currently:

PASSIVE: The enemy with the most kills in the last 5 minutes is marked as the Villain. The mark cannot be assigned to another champion while Garen is in combat with the Villain. If more than one enemy has the same bounty, the enemy who received it first is marked as the Villain. Garen's basic attacks and each spin of Judgment against the Villain deal 1% of their maximum health as bonus true damage.

There are a lot of problems with it. For starters, you have no say on who is going to be the villain. This just feeds more into you being reliant on enemies instead of being able to dictate things yourself. So instead of always going for the villain, you often just have to ignore it because of some twist of fate the enemy Nunu or Thresh turned out to be the one who made the only kill in the last few minutes, which doesn't really work with the whole hunt-the-enemy-mvp fantasy. You want to be able to mark the most threatening enemy champion for death but instead it more or less is left up to chance.

So instead, why not change the first paragraph of the villain passive to the following?

PASSIVE: Choose one of your allies to be your protege. The enemy champion that is currently the nearest to the protege is marked as the villain. If your protege dies, the champion that has killed your protege is marked as the villain instead until your protege respawns.

This way, you have much more control of who the villain is and playing Garen in teamfights suddenly becomes much more skillful. It's not just run at the most available target until it's dead, instead it's protect this one dedicated ally as best as you can and position yourself so you can react the best way to enemy threats. It just adds a ton more skill to his villain passive that it currently just doesn't have.

Also, if we are speaking of what this means thematically, I think it's much better than his current villain passive aswell. If you look at his lore, Garen is nothing like Darius, even though they currently pretty much play the same and like Darius' lore - a merciless bloodthirsting maniac, that runs into enemy lines to brutally execute the enemies of his state.

But Garen isn't like that. He isn't nearly as aggressive, since Demacia is much more of a defensive region than Noxus. He is more of a protector of his land and the innocent and weak that live in it and bringer of judgement to anyone who threatens them. Thematically, the reworked passive fits perfectly with that and it also makes Garen something different than just "a worse Darius", it gives you a reason to pick one instead of the other because they fill different niches and have different playstyles with different strengths and weaknesses. One is made to be an aggressive type that cuts a path into the enemy team for himself and allies to go through whereas the other puts an immovable object between him and his team and someone that has the tools to react to any enemy threat. It's like the two are polar opposites of each other, which fits really well with their lores imo.

Lastly, before anyone asks, here is a more in-depth look at how some of the new villain passive mechanics would work. If your protege doesn't die to an enemy champion and gets executed instead, whoever is nearest to the corpse becomes the villain until your protege respawns again. Furthermore, once you have chosen your protege, you can't change it, so a lot of thought has to go into who you are going to choose. Lastly, you would pick your protege similarly to how Kindred choose the champion they hunt, by clicking on an icon that appears on your screen.

What do you guys think? What changes does Garen need, if any at all? How exactly would you change him? What do you think about the buffs he got this patch and my ideas for his reworked villain passive? I'd love to have a proper discussion with you guys, so go wild.