Is Garen just for noobs?
I've only actually seen beginners play Garen 
but he looks quite powerful. Is he a good champion to play with even as you get higher up or is he more of just a beginners champion?
9 Comments
hes easy to pick up in general. he has more mastery to his kit than many people want to admit or even realize, but still not as much as some other champions.
hes one of the worst champions in the game at high diamond, and its exceptionally hard to get past diamond with him. only two people made it to masters last season by 1 tricking garen.
the upside is, that hes still pretty good into mid diamond, and this patch hes currently like rank 7 top laner.
also, the two people who made it to masters with him last season used absolutely entirely different builds. one of them basically went full tanky garen, and the other with a carry build.
Short Answer: Generally speaking, yes.
Long Answer: It depends. Garen is a champion that is what’s known as a Fundamentals-based character (taking a page from fighting games). He’s one of those characters that are mechanically quite simple but are powerful if the players have strong fundamental skills in the game.
GBay99 actually released a video about what he learned playing Garen for like 30 games or something. You should check it out.
I remember Westrice climbing really high with Garen in like S4?
That was a long time ago tho
Garen's ok. He's hard to peel so he's a nuisance in teamfights and not worth poking later on due to his passive. He makes a good wall. My issue with Garen is that for a tank he doesn't bring much CC so I see Garens more distracting an ADC out of a teamfight and just forcing the support to try to peel rather than actually locking them down so the team can take them out. Imo, something like Mao'kai or Illaoi will generally bring more to the table for a team, and something like Trundle takes carries out better.
Regardless, he's definitely a fine pick if you know how to play him.
There used to be a high diamond streamer who played garen almost exclusively, so it's not like he's impossible to do work with, but he's generally considered a noob champ because his simple kit makes him more likely to be kept down. He has fewer outplay options, less skill expression, less utility, he won't carry dead weight allies even if he has 15 kills, and Riot is far less likely to buff him or allow him to be widely viewed as 'strong' because he's so simple.