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Garen, and his scaling into the late-game

Manchette·4/21/2014, 2:25:02 AM·3 votes·976 views

I have heard a few complaints about how Garen is massively constrained by his ultimate and its long cooldown. This has bugged me for some time now, until I checked out his champion profile and found that it had an 80 second cooldown when fully leveled. On many champions, their ultimates' cooldown will only reach 100 seconds.

Growing curious, I noted as well that Garen's E - Judgement, scales up to +110% AD/sec when fully leveled and his Q - Decisive Strike, reaches a whopping +140% AD when fully leveled.

Even if Garen is built as a tank, his W scales well with Armor and MR, which could still possibly keep him powerful. Not to mention that his ultimate does not need AD to do damage.

These damage ratios are actually quite high compared to some bruisers, and this has led me to wonder if Garen not only preforms well in the mid-game, but perhaps he also scales well into the late-game. I do not have first-hand experience with this hypothesis, however I would like to hear feedback about whether this is true or not.

6 Comments

Cerbearus4/21/2014, 2:48:28 AM3 votes

Garen's problem is not his potential damage, rather the ability to actually get that damage on someone. Garen is infinitely kited by almost anyone, has no hard cc, and his only gap closer is a speed boost.

Build damage on Garen, have fun getting blown up, build tank and you are completely ignored. Other tanks have hard cc to compensate for low lategame damage, and other fighters have some way of sticking damage to people without having to run blindly at them.

Khorne4/21/2014, 3:12:46 AM2 votes

He still completely lacks any sort of poke or true gapclosing/escape other than running towards or away from his foe. Certainly, his E allows him to ghost through units.. though he sacrifices quite a bit of movement speed. Also, his ultimate scales on nothing but the target's missing health.

He's one of the better-balanced bruisers in the game.. of course he'll deal a lot of damage if you just build damage, or get stupidly tanky if you only build tankiness. He's rewarded well for pure builds but the team suffers if he does that.