Garen's counterplay, now?

Inari Fox Orrion··2 votes·1,624 views

He's supposed to be a slow-moving juggernaut, right? Well here we are with Lethality so broken that every single Garen I ever see has to build item 3142 item 3814 or be otherwise flamed for being useless to the team. So, with said items and his otherwise-normal build w/ item 3071 you have someone with 4k HP who deals 1.2k damage with their Q, up to 3k at once with their E, 140 armor and 150 resist if not more.

Look, I'm not one to say that it's bad that tanks can now nuke people... but this is just insane. The Lethality items remove the counterplay TO Garen, where it says in his death recap to build armor against him... but it's insane to do so when even with full tank gear, reaching something like 200 armor, he lops off 100~ of that with his usual combo and then, thanks to Lethality, treats that 100 like it's 50ish.

P.S: You can try and kite all you like, but it's fairly hard to kite a Garen with item 3142 active, item 3009 and his Q. And if you don't kite him? Well... he one-shots you, what else is there to it? Recent ranked games of mine have just made it very obvious when he gets a triple with a single E.

20 Comments

GreenLore3 votes

No he is not a tank,he is a fighter(or a juggernaut to be more specific). And fighters are supposed to deal a lot of damage,while being able to take a lot of punishment as well.

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

Alright, that's fine - I take it back; Fighter/Juggernaut and not a tank.

Now explain to me how much sense it makes to have a stupidly hard-to-kite, hard-to-kill, deadly-as-hell, quick-as-fuck character whose literally able to one-shot an entire team if they're grouped close enough together, regardless of armor and/or counter-play?

Mecha MaIphite1 votes

One shot an entire team?

If you picked 5 squishes and bunched up like that, you deserve to get one shot.

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

Right but that isn't really my point.

My point is that the Lethality buff and items made once-situational items core to him, and turned him from an annoying but clearly-counteractable champion into something that both goes against the rules of the game and what it tells you AND at the same time is incredibly unfun to fight.

Like, tell me, what's the counter to a 600-movespeed champion that can E you down from 250 armor to 120, then hit you once with his Q for something like 700 damage? If he was slow, I could buy that... but he's not slow at fucking all. The only way to counter him is to have people die to him or to have the person on the other end waste their item active cooldown before even seeing an enemy champion.

Big Lincoln2 votes

Now explain to me how much sense it makes to have a stupidly hard-to-kite, hard-to-kill, deadly-as-hell, quick-as-fuck character whose literally able to one-shot an entire team if they're grouped close enough together, regardless of armor and/or counter-play?

because if you make up bullshit you can make any champ seem broken. Garen is one of the easiest champs to kite in the universe. any mage can build Rylai and make him useless; red buff, useless - a support that's actually paying attention, he's useless

if they're grouped close enough together,

because you deserve to get wiped if all 5 of you are standing within a 400 unit diameter of each other. any other AOE champion would demolish you just the same

GreenLore1 votes

Even with the lethality buff,Garen isn't even the most successful when buying the lethality items http://champion.gg/champion/Garen/Top

And Garen is far from "quick as fuck",he has one ability that gives him a small speed boost,thats really far from "quick"

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

No, he's not the best-in-tier with Lethality, but he's way too effective with it - 1.5k games @ a 55% winrate with one Lethality piece, 57% with two, is not okay.

He's not quick with just his Q, but add in item 3009 and item 3142's active and...

Edit: No clue why OP.GG and Champion.GG have different statistics. Going off of Champion.GG, 54% winrate in Bronze? The fuck? I want some of that good good that Riot's smoking. But hey, it's balanced because he can be kited, right? Darius

Edit2: Convenient that his win-rate drops off from 51% to 49% at Plat, when only one of several few champions are played reliably in that bracket, and one of said select few champions counters him. Fiora

Edit3: One source is unreliable, beware of confirmation bias; I'm using aggregated and averaged data from OP.GG, Champion.GG, LolKing and Pickban.

Critmaster Garen2 votes

hes a juggernaut.

juggernauts are a type of fighter, not tank. the reason why lethality is so effective on him is because his spin shreds 25% of the opponents armor.

the % shred on the spin stacks better with the flat penetration from lethality than with the % shred on cleaver most of the time. especially against very squishy teams, this makes item 3142 item 3814 very effective on him.

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

But the thing is that Lethality itself is broken as all hell now. Items you'd usually not buy unless under certain circumstances are now standard-built on him by anyone with any amount of notable experience.

dominusx2 votes

Maokai i can oneshot you without even building lethality just need a item 3025 for dmg. hehe

Mecha MaIphite1 votes

You just triggered every tank main on this board by calling Garen a tank.

Also, those numbers are obviously exaggerated. He will not do upwards of a thousand damage with one Q, and he will not have 4K hp and 150 resists while building 2-3 damage items.

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

I'm pretty sure of what I saw while fighting, and on my death recap. Teammates reported the same thing.

Mecha MaIphite2 votes

He deals 130 + 140% AD with it. Assuming you have 0 armor, he would need around 700 AD along with % damage masteries to even get close to that.

Touch My Box2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Mecha MaIphite,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=M5yE6lEl,comment-id=000200000000,timestamp=2017-03-02T12:05:50.495+0000)

He deals 130 + 140% AD with it. Assuming you have 0 armor, he would need around 700 AD along with % damage masteries to even get close to that.

  1. The auto can also crit keep in mind.

But when you fall below 0 armor, it does bonus damage.

45 from the standard lethality build is pretty decent, combined with the 50% ish from his spin+cleaver.

Im not saying he is broken, but it is definitely possible to hit for 1k with just your Q.

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

I'm more arguing against Lethality being built on a juggernaut, especially when one of said Lethality items basically guarantees him a kill because of the movement speed boost - a massive boost that actually completely negates one of the weaknesses of the archetype for a guaranteed kill. item 3142

Oh well, I'll now take "easily-kited" the same way I do with Darius that has a item 3742 and a item 3009 which is to say, "very few weaknesses other than being five-manned."

TyrekGoldenspear1 votes

... Well looks like I'll have to put Garen on Teemo's Advocate at some point.

Rip Rengo 20161 votes

item 3156 item 3053

Inari Fox Orrion1 votes

So I can take literally one more Q, if not less?

Rip Rengo 20161 votes

both of those items nullify his ult.

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