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@RiotRepertoir, Can we talk about Garen and his place now after the Juggernaut patch?

Darkomantis·8/30/2016, 4:27:34 PM·32 votes·2,531 views

I wanted to bring this to RiotRepertoir's attention since he was the last Rioter to mention Garen in a follow up thread on Dev Corner. It's been just slightly over one year since this thread was made in response to Garen's changes in the Juggernaut patch.

Since the Juggernaut patch, Garen has gotten a lot of nerfs to his basic kit to accommodate the Villain mechanic. Frankly, as much as the balance team wants to shove the "Justice" agenda onto Garen, it just isn't working for him. Why does Garen have true damage only on a certain winning champion while Darius and Fiora can only destroy whichever person? At times, the Villain mechanic becomes completely useless due to Garen being more kitable(less MS, reduced tankiness, removed tenacity) than he was before and at times you can't reach targets, the Villain mark is on an extremely tanky/hyper mobile character, or how Villain targets can still just completely overpower you.

In the current state of the game, Garen is running around with low mobility with little to no CC depending on who you're fighting compared to the more revised champions and newer champions(who seemingly have more mobility+situational power/CC). While there are ways to nudge Garen up a bit for doing good in the early-mid game, like for instance:

  • Reverting the -5 movement speed nerf
  • Giving Garen back his Decisive Strike movement speed duration/5% buff speed or reducing the CD after use to allow it to be used more often
  • Reducing the CS strain to acquire tankiness by allowing Garen 4 stacks per champion kill, cannon minion, large monsters and epic monsters that was oddly enough removed and/or giving 5 armor/magic resistance with one point in Courage and reduce unit farm count to 100 from 120. Or give back Garen's bonus 20% armor/resistance

I feel Garen needs to be brought back to the design board and have his theme reverted back from a Villain seeking champion to his state of being a Tanky Assassin who could make a pick on a target carry before the Juggernaut patch. Riot needs to have a 2-3 day forum talk discussing Garen and what can be done.

55 Comments

Zetto8/30/2016, 5:03:37 PM27 votes

"tanky assassin'

No.

Keìron8/30/2016, 9:20:17 PM6 votes

IMO he needs a full rework. His passive and W are really bad designed abilities.

iTaLenTZ8/30/2016, 7:09:30 PM6 votes

I have been saying this since he got reworked. He doesn't fit any strategic niche. He was fine for a couple of weeks after the rework because his itemization was one of the strongest in the game back then until everyone started abusing it and all the items got nerfed. Now there are better ones for other classes and on top of that his kit got heavily nerfed and a lot of his strengths got removed. His kit is underloaded. His rework has completely failed. I never think "well this is a good time to pick Garen". Anything he could do any toplaner can do better. He is now an even worse version of Darius than before.

I used to main him like Taric and Malzahar and all 3 champs got destroyed by Repertoir.

Myrfin8/30/2016, 8:10:55 PM4 votes

Garen is one of my favorite champions, but there is no real reason to play him at the moment. Other champions do everything he does, but better.

He gets abused in most toplane matchups, and can't jungle. He has no cc besides a silence. He gets kited easily. His passive is worthless early game, but becomes amazing very late (by then the game is decided anyway). Taking TP feels like a waste early, as he isn't tanky enough before courage stacks up to jump in a big fight, and has no hard cc to tie people up.

Maybe buffing his passive early, and nerfing a bit lategame, and making it so only drag/baron can deactivate it in the jungle would at least make him a passable jungler. A buff to his early passive would help in lane as well, as most of the time you basically can't use it in lane unless you are spinning in circles under tower and letting your opposing laner get all the cs.

All that griping aside, if you somehow cheese your opposing laner hard enough to crush them in lane, you can snowball into a scary monster that causes the enemy team to flame in allchat about Garen being OP. Games like that are few and far between, however.

King of Mongoose8/30/2016, 6:17:50 PM3 votes

he's already a tanky assassin, q e r will end everything in its path

are you actually asking for garen buffs?? lmfao why would you make the most brain dead champion strong

Skias8/31/2016, 3:14:24 PM3 votes

The problem you have is overbuffing a very binary champion with a low skill floor. The slightest buff can lead to him smothering top because none can beat him.

Lohenngramm8/31/2016, 10:23:18 PM2 votes

Personally I'd like them to remove his E's ability to crit in exchange for making the ability stronger. I know people complained when Repertoir almost removed it, but back then there was a greater variety of crit items that you could build. Now, besides Infinity Edge and Essence Reaver, Crit only exists on attack speed items which are wasted on Garen. Even then, ER isn't great on him as you need to both stack crit and have mana to get value out of the item, and IE on it's own isn't enough crit to be a reliable damage boost for the spin.

I feel E needs to be stronger because it's Garen's main source of damage. When he got reworked, people made a big deal about how it could do 1000-1200 damage to a single target. It does that on an AOE ability (and does less damage if it hits multiple targets), over 3 seconds, without applying lifesteal. To compare: when I hit late game as Draven, my basic auto-attacks will do roughly 1050 damage and apply life steal and I can hit multiple auto's in 1 second. As a juggernaut, Garen is supposed to be a melee carry (as stated by Riot), but he doesn't do nearly enough damage to carry effectively unless he's horrendously fed.

I suspect the design philosophy behind Juggernaut Garen was: He wades into the enemy team, disrupting and damaging them, surviving due to his huge defensive stats until he can back out and heal. Hence his kit has more defensive power than Darius and Illaoi who instead receive more damage and in-combat sustain as a tradeoff. This worked back in the Juggernaut update because it came out at the tail end of the tank-meta, where defensive itemization was very strong. However, this is Season 6 and defensive itemization is significantly weaker, while keystones and item changes have made offense much stronger (This is also why there's been a focus on offense-based champion building defensive items). The result is that more damage oriented Juggernauts with in-combat sustain (Darius, Mordekaiser, Illaoi) are all more effective in the role than Garen is.

Poske8/31/2016, 5:38:05 PM2 votes

His place is with begginers

What else should we talk about ?

Its not like every single garen main wanted for garen to stay simplistic

HE DID ... AND thats not a good thing

Critmaster Garen8/30/2016, 6:30:34 PM2 votes

im gonna say no to the % resistance increase.

while i think his w could use some buffs, and his villain mechanic could use some tweaks to not land on the wrong target too many times, the flat resistance bonus on courage gives him a lot more freedom in itemization than before the rework.

i absolutely hated it when they changed his current stack mechanic to the % mechanic with his first mini rework. because it locked his itemization down to big reistance items if he wanted to profit from the bonus at all. he didnt have the freedom of stacking straight health, or damage like he did before and does now again.

it had the advantage that it made him kinda good against teams that lean either heavy towards physical or magic damage, giving a lot of extra resistances when he could go with full armor or full mr builds. but it was much worse against mixed teams, or when you wanted to build health.

plus, with the amount of bonus armor penetration in the game right now, the bonus would be nowhere near as good as it used to be against full ad teams.

GULAG 4 U8/31/2016, 6:02:42 PM1 votes

No garen is not a tanky assassin.

No thank you. I don't want Ekko 2.0

CppL8/31/2016, 10:39:21 AM1 votes

"tank assasin" , "high skill cap champ" holy shit ,wtf are you guys smoking??

Hahahahyena8/30/2016, 9:03:04 PM1 votes

until garen gets damage nerf to his bullshit e & r he doesnt need buffs