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So what to do about the bruisers

Brycerras·9/6/2015, 9:39:23 AM·1 votes·300 views

Ok, so what is there to really do about bruisers like garen or darius getting into games. Obviously, you can ban them at champ select if possible, but if for some reason that does not happen and the opposing team gets one of these power houses, what to do next?

Ill start with some thoughts. A decent garen player is someone who knows how to play top lane, how to get farm even with ranged champs that can poke, and knows the limitations of Garen during early and mid game. This means that out playing him is the only real viable option, but the ability to do that I feel shrinks with the current meta since all garen really must do is buy 1 or so DPS item and build full tank/armor/hp. After a certain point, you cant effectively deny farm because he is to hard to straight up kill, and his wave clear is pretty damn good, considering all things. Hes obviously not immortal, but hes such a pain in the ass now you cannot ignore him cause he can run itno a team fight and score a kill or two by himself.

This troubles me because that prevents any kind of good game play in a broader aspect. If a tank can essentially buy 1 dps item, and build all def from there on, thats kind of on the level of broken. Personally, my philosophy is that a tank should bring either two things to a team fight: tankiness and DPS, or tankiness and utility. With garens kit, he gets all 3 with no real draw backs. If a champ can essentially lay out pretty high damage with no investment in damage items, that to me kind of feels like an issue.

I dunno, I just feel that this rework to make garen (and other bruisers) viable in a certain level of gameplay went steps to far. Garen to me was fairly fine before. He couldnt destroy someone sure, but he was there to make peoples lives harder. Now, he can run into fights, kill a person or two, and tilt the rest of the match in his teams favor. And its done to easily. And while I do understand that you should just pick champs that can counter him, I feel that is flawed logic if you have to pick 2 or 3 champs to counter just one, or have to pick champs with very certain abilities (snares, stuns) to just counter what should essentially be just a tank.

So back ot the first question, what are suggestions to deal with this issue in a match up? Is there a way to essentially shut down a Garen? Hell, are there champs (other than darius) who can effectively push garen out of lane?

1 Comments

redniwediS9/6/2015, 1:05:24 PM1 votes

Now, he can run into fights, kill a person or two, and tilt the rest of the match in his teams favor.

This is actually how quite a few Garen mains, including myself, played Garen before the juggernaut update. They didn't change the way Garen was played, they made it easier to play him the right way.

People who played tank Garen before really had no idea what they were doing. Bruisers have Fighter as a primary attribute after all.

Now for Garen specifically you have to realize what type of champion he is first. Garen is a punisher, so the first thing you should do is look at the list of champions you know how to play well. Punisher champions are able to capitalize on mistakes far faster and far more effectively than most champions, so having a good baseline is where you should start.

Secondly you have to decide how you want to beat him. There are a lot of options, but for the sake of conversation I'll narrow it down to two big ones; do you want to get ahead or set him behind?

If you would prefer to get ahead I would suggest picking someone who can out sustain him. Nasus, Tryndamere, Aatrox, Xin, and Vlad all do this innately. You don't want to go for kills here, you want to freeze the lane in a spot that favors you and keep Garen from getting gold. He'll likely still get experience, and while he does scale well with levels he doesn't scale as well with them as he used to. When Garen can't all in someone his strategy is hit and run, so being able to sustain faster than he can all but make you invulnerable to him. Just be extra careful for that jungler.

If you want to set him behind your goal is similar to just getting ahead, but you also need to have a whole lot of kill pressure any time Garen shows his face in lane. I would recommend Fiora, Diana, Lissandra, or Yasuo for this. You freeze lane like you would in the other suggestion, however when Garen moves into experience range you all in him and force him to either blow escapes or die. Depending on the champion you pick you may have to wait for a power spike (looking at you Lissandra) but Garen can be burst down fairly easily with the right pick in the early game.

Again keep in mind that Garen has very few hard counters, but a whole lot of soft counters. If you make a mistake he can capitalize on he can turn a soft countered matchup around, but if you don't give him an opening he can be shut down very easily.