How to fix Garen
Garen is a pretty shitty champion at the moment. His mobility & cc are very limited, his damage is okay, his passive has little synergy with his kit and encourages a weirdly passive playstyle, and his ult is boring (although the visual effect is cool). I've played a lot of Garen in my day, he was my first main back when I started playing LoL in the fall of 2012, and I logged over 250 ranked games with him in S3. Thematically, Garen is a cool champion with a fun persona, and his core mechanic of spinning is really satisfying. Here's how I think he can be fixed:
Passive - Perserverance: As the passive currently exists, it forces Garen into this weird pattern of avoiding his enemy laner after a few trades, so that he can avoid harass and regen some health back. To me, this is counter intuitive to Garen's playstyle, and what his kit is designed for - aggressive, relentless trading. I think his passive would be better if (similar to Fiora's passive) he would regen a % of his max health per second while in combat, an amount which would increase as his health became lower. This would encourage Garen players to be aggressive, and reinforces the image of Garen as an extremely-hard-to-kill-sonuvabitch. After all, the name of the passive is "Perserverance," not "hold on for a second, let me go chill out and regen health for a while please."
Q - Decisive Strike: This ability is largely fine, I don't think it really needs to be changed. I know that Riot has recently been slowly getting rid of most silences, but it doesn't make much sense for this ability to apply anything other than a silence or stun. Maybe if they really wanted to get rid of the silence, they could give the ability a Bleed with a slow attached, or something.
W - Courage: This ability is also fine, the passive armor + MR buff is nice for Garen, and allows him to build only 3-4 tank items and be very very beefy. The active is fine as well, the small window it gives you to trade at rank 1 makes it so that you need to skillfully anticipate your opponent's burst, and activate W accordinly. In late game, it gives him the tankiness and tenacity he needs to dive the enemy team, with it's 6 second 30% tenacity + damage reduction.
E - Judgement: Garen's signature move, I think this is ability functions just fine. It allows him to do some nice AoE DPS while moving, which is a valuable trait for an offtank bruiser like Garen. It would be cool if Judgement applied a slow, but I think a lot of people would complain about it, and talk about how a brainless champ like Garen shouldn't have a slow on his spin, so I'll leave that alone. I like the fact that it can crit, and opens up his build to potentially include a higher damage, crit/ arm pen build.
R - Demacian Justice: Honestly, Garen's ult feels satisfying when you can get kills with it, but it's not particularly interesting as far as abilities go. It's just a point and click, close range, single target execute. I think it would be better if they change his ult to a Ground- Targeted, AoE skillshot execute; the visual could be much the same, and the damage would be higher the closer to center the ability landed. The range could be increased from 400 to something like 700-800, and instead of dealing magic damage, it should deal physical damage (so it could synergize with arm pen), or a moderate amount of True Damage.
With a kit like this, Garen would be a helluva lot more interesting to play, with much better internal synergy for his kit.
