A possible way to make Garen viable again.
 

TL;DR
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Hey there, this is my first post on the forums I believe but I'm here to post my thoughts on what may make Garen viable again. Take note, I will absolutely take constructive criticism in any form, granted that it is indeed CONSTRUCTIVE.

So, Garen, the Might of Demacia. He certainly lives up to the title throughout the early minutes of a game (read, 15 minutes.) but falls off horrendously late game. Why is this?
Let's look at his abilities.

His Q, Decisive Strike, is a movement speed increasing silence that procs on his next auto attack. This is a great part of Garen's kit because it is his general playstyle to literally charge into a team, and use two of his other abilities, which are as follows:
His W is a damage decreasing active with a permanent Magic resist/Armor granting passive for each minion/champion he slays. At rank 5, the active decreases all damage input towards him by 36%.
His E, Judgement, is his spin2win as we know it. It has great base damage for early game, and is meant to attack those who are running away.
His R is a finishing blow, a coup de grace, that does more damage the less health an enemy has.

These abilities promote aggressive, "in your face" style gameplay. You may be thinking what I may want to propose to "fix" Garen. His problem is that you build him full DPS, he isn't beefy enough. If you build him full tank, he does no damage. There is no inbetween because either way, he falls off. As of now, Garen is only a single target nuke late game. And his E does no damage late game! So what can we do to up his damage a little later on when you have the beef to go into a full team head on? Here is my proposal:

Edited so that he is unchanged aside from his ultimate. Before I had made it so Judgement was a low cooldown ultimate with a higher scaling and base damage and that his E was a smaller version of his ult. Unfortunately, it did not synergize well and was very gimmicky.

Edited so that his ultimate's scaling is lower and that it gives a few more damage boosts. It would have been way too overpowered if left the way it was.


Based off of Garen's role, (AoE Beefy DPS) I have decided that it would be best to keep him the way he is, only changing his ultimate.
If I were to rework Garen, his new ultimate would become this:

Demacian Justice: Garen musters all of his might to execute foes he has recently damaged. Enemies that have been hurt by Garen's Judgement gain one Justice stack per tick that comes in contact with them (Maximum 6 Justice stacks, one for each tick). Justice stacks are removed after 5 seconds.

(Passive): Garen's will to defeat his foes becomes stronger, gaining 5 / 15 / 25 armor penetration and 15 / 25 / 35 Attack Damage.

(Active): For each Justice stack enemies around Garen have, they take 50 / 100 / 150 magical damage. This ability does not scale.

Cooldown: 100 / 85 / 70 seconds.


Please tell me what you think of this!

I have to ask coopy is his new E going to scale with AP or AD because from what i have seen AD scaling magic skills tend to do less damage. Although i like the Idea of making his E his ultimate and making it severely stronger so that he has some real damage in endgame.

I was thinking that his e could possibly have a .8% AP ratio, even though I wanted to stay true to his old mechanic that none of his abilities scale with AP. But it could be a nice change. Thanks for the reply!

cry more babay

That sure isn't constructive.

Bumping for Justice.

Garen is viable. My friend plays him all the time, and is a beast as him. However, AD Garen is not viable. The best strategy for Garen is to play him offensively and focus all points into Decisive and Judgement. Play with a good ally, and try and get as many early game kills as possible. Do not build any offensive items. Then move into getting a Warmog's first, then build more and more defensive items, depending on enemy team composition.

I can agree with that statement, but the whole point of Garen is to soak up some damage while dealing out a fair amount too. He can't really do that late game because by then everyone has some sort of resistances and his Judgement, which is his main skill, is completely null. He's like a backwards Jax without burst, he's excellent early game but then just goes down the drain late game. He's completely overshadowed by other DPS such as Xin, Jarvan, and Renekton.

while im all for a buffed Garen, the idea about the E being an ult needs some tweaking. If the damage on his e was buffed considerably like your suggesting, than garen is going to turn into an anniex2 regarding a free lvl 6 kill. the base damage on the ult should remain the same, but have it scale immensely with ad/crit.

Garen is more useful early game than late game, but here is a guide I have been following and having great success with.

http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=1597

By the end of the build (I add in typically an Aegis and turn brutalizer into Youmuus at some point) you end up with about...

250 AD
48 Armor Pen
210ish Armor and Magic Resistance(More than 200 basically. Good for surviving anything)
And 3K health.
Not to mention 15% spell pen which can help your ultimate rack up kills.

Early game with that build Garen can easily shred even tanks and I get first blood which leads into an insane killing spree almost constantly. Garens Q can hit for about 140 damage at the first rank which is insane if you have some 400 Hp squishy in the lane.