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So why was Garen so broken he needed a rework after about 5/6 seasons of LOL?

DarwinTheory··7 votes·894 views

I never saw Garen consistently played at high elo or in LCS in LOL's first 5/6 seasons so I don't get why he was subsequently nerfed into oblivion with the Juggernaught patch. Can anyone shed light on this?

Lets look at the facts here:

Pre Juggernaut:

Q - Longer silence. 2.5 seconds. Would help high keep high motility champions pinned down (says hello Ekko / Ahri / Yasuo / zed / fizz / fiora- all champions currently considered broken) W - Tenacity. Allowed you to get through the enemy team near the ADC to make an impact at least W - Immediate armour boost. Made laning phase survivable. E - Better early game damage. You could actually trade with Riven and Darius. It had a weaker end game compared to now but games now rarely go past 25 / 30 minutes anyway so the 'new' 'better late game E' is pretty useless in the current META. Bonus: Superior movement speed

Result: Rarely picked in upper leagues. Never picked LCS; maybe 1/2 times at most. Broken? OP? Clearly NOT.

Now look at the post Juggernaught Garen:

Q - Gutted to 1.5 seconds. Add to this a reduced E early game damage. You Q say Ahri then E her. The silence lasts 1.5 seconds, your E sucks she simply take the damage, laughs, kites you and kills you. People say Garen has a binary kit but even a binary kit like this sucks in it's current form. W - No Tenacity. You now have to build up your armour bonus by killing minions. Meanwhile Darius & Riven now wreck you embarasingly. Lane phase is a fight for survival, you're like Nasus tower farmingi with your passive in place of lifesteal but you dont get any sclaing damage on the level of Nasus E - Very little damage for several levels. You're basically free farm for most melee champions in the lane phase - see above. Negative: Gutted movement speed. Ironically at a time in LOL when motility and overloaded kits are at an all time high (seriously RIOT who balances this game? How much are you paying them??????) Bonus / Negative: Villain mechanic. Great, you deal true damage to one person on the team. If it's not the ADC or fed overloaded champion though............you're useless because Garen no longer has Tenacity to force the enemy team to adapt in a teamfight by pushing his way to a meaningful enemy.

Result: Still rarely picked in upper leagues. Never picked LCS. Broken? Clearly NOT.

So I return to my original statement: What made the original Garen so hardcore OP he got nerfed to this laughable state. And it is laughable. His original form was a direct counter to many of the space aids champions currently dominating LOL that are picked every game without being so directly OP he was played consitently at high levels.

And before anyone says his kit is binary and it was OP at bronze I'll point out Yi is even more binary and horreoundously more OP in bronze. Not only that RIOT don't seem to care about Lee Sins broken bronze kit.

6 Comments

Ralanr5 votes

Garen wasn't reworked because he was broken. He was reworked because of how binary he was.

The rework didn't help with that honestly.

Starcraft243ver1 votes

E - Very little damage for several levels. You're basically free farm for most melee champions in the lane phase - see above.

Did you ignore the 25% armor debuff on purpose, making you dishonnest and not worth reading,

or didnt you know, making you an ignorant and thus making your argument pointless ?

Critmaster Garen2 votes

{quoted}

Did you ignore the 25% armor debuff on purpose, making you dishonnest and not worth reading,

or didnt you know, making you an ignorant and thus making your argument pointless ?

at early levels the spin literally deals less damage than auto attacking. thats why you q max in lane.

NovaDisk2 votes

25% Armor Shred in the early levels is pretty negligible. It's only about 8-10 armor gone. It also takes 4 ticks to stack, and since you only start out with 5 ticks, only the last tick does extra damage.

The base damage is also quite low compared to other mid-damage bruisers such as Riven, Jax, or Fiora. The only advantage is you can use it while moving and not drawing minion aggro.

Also, ad hominem arguments tend to also be pointless. Please refrain from using them.

Starcraft243ver1 votes

Intellectual dishonnesty irritates me.

Also why focus on early levels ? It gives garen a good utility in late game.

NovaDisk1 votes

Well, there's a couple of reasons early game is so important.

First off, only about 1/3 of games go past 30 minutes, so there quite often ISN'T any late game, which makes late game scaling poingless.

Second, in this meta, lane priority is incredibly important, and it becomes more and more important the higher on the ladder you climb.

In lower brackets, toplane is pretty much a 1v1 deathmatch that continues until one of the junglers shows up and interrupts it, since there's so much fighting early on, the stronger early game champion is likely to gain a significant advantage and get fed off his lane opponent.

At higher brackets, a losing top lane matchup used to be able to play somewhat passively and try to scale into the midgame, but these days, good toplaners will work with their junglers to invade and control the enemy jungler, force skirmishes, set up dives, or even just show up and take the tower.

With the addition of jungle plants, reduced access to wards, and jungle camps being much more valuable to steal, having early power lets you take over the enemy jungle and the game.

On top of jungle pressure, champions with strong early games can control the minion waves to get an exp and farm advantage, and set up timing windows for getting free recalls or making plays in the early game.

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