Ideas for not making Garen completely unviable
First of all, just wanted to say, I am a low elo Garen main so obviously i may have some bias agaist the nerfs which will dircectly affect me and others who are significantly superior than me at garen. And I am being honest of they are nerfing his W and reducing its remaining duration of dmg reduction from 2/3/4/5/6 to 2/2.5/3/4/5 and reducing the dmg reduction and tenacity from 30% to 20% while buffing the very short burst of dmg reduction and tenacity to 65% rather than 60% would be a nerf. Another viable nerf would be a nerf to his ultimate in terms if the villain aspect. I feel as though something the community may not mind is a redcution in flat damage to the villain while retaining the true damage. To give an example of this his ultimate currently deals 175/350/525 plus 28/33/40% of his targets max health at level one. A viable nerf would be to reduce that damage to Villains to around 150/320/525 plus 25/30/40% while retaining the true damage aspect. Due to all these nerfs a buff would be nice in terms of his Q speeding up its animation and movement speed to 35% at rank 3 and above. His E is currently the weakest part of his kit increasing its damage at ranks 3+ would be good, this would make it easy to split push in late parts of the game. I think these changes.
Im not at all expecting this to be the nerfs or buffs he recieves in 8.17. This may slightly weaken his laning phase while making him a better split pusher in the later portions of the game. While keeping him as a viable top laner.