A Letter to the producer from the ultimate Garen fan(atic) [In-Depth][Philosophical]
TL;DR: I will start with the tldr changelist to be kind. I really hope someone from Riot reads beyond into my justifications.
How to fix Garen: Q- Decisive strike- Add the same cooldown discount if you cancel it early that Judgment was given Q- Increase the duration of Silence as you go up in levels (back to 2.5 secs at 16), again similar to Judgment's spin count E- Courage- Put the Tenacity back on this as you level up, (back to the old value at 16) Just make me feel good when I time this skill correctly. W- Judgement- Remove heroes from the 75% damage clause (seriously wtf) R- No changes
OK so I play too much Garen. I know this already. The reasons why are not important. Let's just say I really like the champ and leave it at that.
What is important is that I can give you (presumably if anyone at Riot reads this) a useful review of the good and the bad and the confusing (more on this later) changes that have been made to my favorite champ.
The Good
The main goal here according to Riot was to give Garen a better late game. Ok I think this is a great idea and I am all for it. So the first good thing is that ultimately I think RIot wants to take Garen in the same direction I would like to see him go. The changes to Judgment clearly work towards this goal. It has been given a solid AD ratio and additional spins to make up for the base damage nerf as you level up. Spin now scales on total AD which is a nice change if your goal is stronger late game. We have to pay for it in raw damage however. So our early game is weaker but our late game is stronger. The break even point for this is about level 13-15 in my experience. I find this unfairly high. I think the above changes will help the break even point to be more fair.
Spin's cooldown was normalized to 9 seconds at all levels, which seems like a great big buff to it on paper. The problem is that the early ranks of Spin at low levels were weakened so much that you dont really find many profitable opportunities to cast it at ranks 1-2 when the cooldown was a lot longer previously. So we are paying a lot for this cooldown buff. I would much rather see a longer cooldown if it gave the thing meaningful damage at early ranks, you know kind of how it use to be? I dont feel great about having a skill that's pointless before rank 3. Even before the revamp, when it was better at ranks 1-2, I rarely found a ton of times to use it. As it stands now I only use it as a "double-hit" for csing early on.
The cooldown reduction bonus when you cancel Spin early is, in my opinion, the best change to the skill from a functionality standpoint. Here they have come up with a great way to add complexity to the skill and reward tight play without adding much if anything in terms of overall power. I love this change and I want to see more of it in Garen. Why not add this functionality to Q? Cancel it early, use it again sooner...seems fair? This would be a great opportunity to add some overall synergy and unified theme to Garen's kit.
The auto attack range increase was cute little buff. It helps a bit, but I hope we aren't counting that too heavy when its time to add up the buffs and nerfs because its barely a buff. In fact if you jungle garen you will notice the range increase causes problems on mobs like Gromph for example. You can hit Gromp at max range with Q and then start spinning and it will be out of range of his hitbox now. Its no big deal but still.
The AD per level was a rather large buff, and it needs to be tallied as such, however we pay a steep price in raw HP per level and this makes no sense to me at all based on what Riot said they want Garen to be doing (i.e. heroically rescuing ppl). The Villain changes were overall nice buff. The villain scheme is both thematic and useful in a practical way in the game. But again here I feel like Riot is tallying this a bit too high. This sort of brings us to the bad parts of the revamp.
The Bad
Ultimately they missed the mark if the goal was to make Garen better late game. The -25% damage for hitting multiple champions effectively negates most of the extra late game damage you were supposed to be letting him have. Revamping Garen so Judgment scales better then taking 25% off the top of the skill at ALL stages of the game is the most assbackwards change in this revamp. It's ridiculous.
Decisive Strike. How I mourn thee. OK so we want Garen to be useful late game right? Great! So why are we giving him a Judgment that has a nice (supposedly) late game while simultaneously removing the only part of Garen's kit that already scaled into the late game??? Boosting one scaling skill while diminishing another sure seems like a net result of 0 added to his scaling to me. I realize that is hugely flawed summary of the two skills, but if the shoe fits...
The silence duration and mobility on Q were the only aspects of Garen's kit that scaled, why would you remove this? Put the silence duration back on this thing and have it level up the same way you have spin level up. We were never getting the full 2.5 duration all game before, we used to wait until level 13 to enjoy that. Make it scale up with level, just like how spin does. This will add to kit cohesion, bolster up the late game, while still leaving his early game in the weakened state that you seem to think Garen deserves.
And for God's sake put the Tenacity back on W. Here we had possibly the most boring skill in all of league and you go ahead and make the active even more boring. I'm fine with the whole return to an increasing W via raw CSing (make up your minds please). You can put that Tenacity back on there, just have it level up the same way as they other two. Can you say Kit Synergy anyone??? You guys should hire me!!
PS- Please guys if you love Garen as much as I do vote this post up. I don't think I am asking for any unfair changes or overall power. I am asking functionality changes that are more in line for their goal of Garen that scales into late game in a logical manner.