Is Garen better as a situational bursty mid-laner than a top laner?
I actually really enjoy Garen. He's a fun champion that almost gets a ton of reactions whenever you build damage with him. When you hit someone with an Q for more than half the carry's health, only to finish them off with a spin for the other half followed by a giant sword in their chest, it's incredibly fun.
However even if you build Garen normally, it's a lot less... enjoyable. Even Nasus with his arguably weaker early game, still has something that junglers can use in a gank. A ranged slow that lasts for years. Garen's complete lack of reliable CC makes his early game even more abysmal since most of the time even if you're pushed under your tower, the jungler will mostly gain nothing from ganking you, since Garen also has no reliable engage to drop on his laner when the jungler shows up. This means that if the jungler is looking for a gank and Garen just suddenly runs at his laner, they're most likely go "okay I'm about to get ganked" and walk away.
Of course someone can say, "You play Garen for the mid-late game, not the early game." Well that's actually one big problem, as a lot of top laners are not. Even other mid-late tanks/bruisers still have something that Garen doesn't. CC. Maokai, Malphite, Illaoi, Singed, Sion, Darius, heck even off-meta top laner picks like Zac, Taric, and Heimerdinger have CC for the jungler to gank with.
So my question is this, is Garen arguably more and viable as a AD mid-laner pick into certain lanes? Like Zed or Katarina?
(fun fact, triforce+steraks sheen procs deal over 400 damage on garen lategame and wreck turrets. the raw power you get out of its passive often compensates for the wasted gold on mana.)
+ defense like 
or 
and possibly a zeal item, depending on how things go
if your team needs a solid frontliner and soft initiator. you get this into heavy defensive bruiser builds.
can improve his waveclear. you can use the active during his spin
can be useful if youre playing against certain ap matchups. singed hates the item for example, since he can only destroy promoted minions very slowly with auto attacks. it can screw with ap split pushers with a lot of waveclear.
ive seen some people build this item last season with fervor. it could work into some more auto attack focused builds like the triforce splitpushing build. havent made much experiences myself with mallet, but the ad/high health combionation fits into the stats garen likes.
(but build at least one armor item and tabi first, or else it's really troll). Your E will melt the enemy team like butter where at the same time you are nearly unkillable.