[{quoted}](name=Beatrice falls,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=n1rG72Au,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-09-11T12:01:12.796+0000)
I care when the
builds
and is as tanky as me with tank items because of the 30% damage reduction that has no scaling and the free armor in his kit + his free sustain for standing still.
garen is a juggernaut. the entire point of these champions is to be beefy melee carries who deal a lot of damage when theyre on top of you, and who can take a punishement.
id say hes one of the few juggernauts who are working as intended in this damage meta, and arent blown up outright for making it into melee range of the enemy team.
its part of their power budget. in return they dont have mobility (no a 30% ms buff doesnt count for much in a game where more than 50% of the champion pool has dashes, jumps, blinks or other powerful mobility tools available and/or is ranged), or utility.
garen is even a special case amongst juggernauts with an incredibly short ranged kit.
usually even other juggernauts have some abilities that extend past their auto attack range. be it nasus wither, darius q and hook, illaois e, yoricks w and e, olafs or mundos q...
garen has no answer to even champions like
throwing axes at him from a distance. he has no in combat sustain like
or
missing health heals either.
all of this leads to him being allowed to be more upfront tanky even for a jugger. this makes him strong in short trades, but the more drawn out a fight is, the less its going to favour him.
garen can beat a lot of champions in the first 4 seconds of a trade, when he uses his q, spin and has his w up. but after that, when his damage reduction runs out, and he doesnt have anything but basic attacks available to him, most champions who are built for sustained damage can easily turn the fight around.
he has plenty of counterplay. infact, he has so much counterplay that its difficult for him to be relevant against good players, to the point where he never even has seen successful pro play, and it was a massive accomplishment for a few garen 1 tricks to make it past diamond and into the lowest ranks of masters.
i want you to understand what that means. even pre rework
before his buffs shortly before his rework when he was generally considered a troll pick and one of the worst champions in this game had 1 tricks in masters at the time. for the longest time, garen was literally ranked THE wost champion in the hands of a capable/high ranked player. even after old urgot and other trash tier champions. this was an actual statistic.
all those buffs that he received were justified. especially the addition of the parry to his w.