Garen is unbalanced. He's pretty underpowered in fact.

He suffers the same issue as Udyr - lack of mobility. He has no reliable gap closer and his CC clear is tied to his speed boost, making kiting him extremely easy. It is why Garen sees almost no competitive play. In addtion, he has absolutely no tools to deal with a ranged opponent in lane, making very easy to shut down.

Just as an example of this, Garen has never seen any competitive play since his rework.

People who have a move like Panth's E with black cleaver takes garen out in no time.

People who complain about Garen don't know how to play against him.

I mostly play Garen and can EASILY tell if my opponent in the lane knows what the heck is doing.

1. If you are not Ranged, you DO NOT attack me. I will kill you most likely. However, there are smart melee champs that, if played correctly, can deal with Garen early.
2. Smart Garens place wards, so you cant gank me. We will catch you hiding and kill
3. In my opinion, Garen cannot be built to be tanky. He must equip damage and critical chance to have ANY hope of killing anything late game. Therefore, know that Garens will focus your support as we cannot kill ADC
4. A tanky Garen is just a useless spot in the team. Don't focus him and dont try to kill him. He can't kill you.
5. if you are low HP and silly enough to hang around any Garen, you deserve to die.

Know how to treat Garens. They are far from needing any sort of nerf. In fact, because their role is very limited and specific, they are not used much in tournaments and not banned much, as someone pointed out above. I also don't think they need a buff - they have a specific role and they do fine with it. If the opposition is bad enough to fall victim to garen in a lane several times early on, they are at a great disadvantage not because "garen op", but because the garen did his job, and you failed to do yours. They have their specific role: Kill early games people who are foolish enough to fight. And poke late game + try to assist others killing a champ.

Asked the community my ass.

Lol, maybe he did ask them if he was unbalanced but didn't specify whether they meant overpowered or underpowered.

lol Garen doesn't need any nerfs, just imagine how you would build him

build damage - not tanky enough and die easily
build tanky - can't even kill minions

It all made sense after I read your name. You know Garen is a hard counter to Riven, right? Anyways, I agree 100% with what Hidden Dragon said.

Gayrun has a lot of counters.

I don't think he got played at all in the tourny last weekend...

That speaks magnitudes within it self.

I completely agree. Garen is a low elo stomper to be sure, but when you realize his gap closer is also his escape, and he can easily be slowed by running through a minion wave during judgement (as this now slows him) you can easily kite him around.

Garen is great in the situation where is can ambush the opponent, but the fact of the matter is you can easily avoid him by simply warding or straying away from bushes in lane. He can't hide in the bush forever if he wants gold after all.

Also the main complaint I see from the OP is that his health regen is simply too high, this is of course false. Anyone who knows their salt about league champions would know Garen is about average for an AD bruiser, and nerfing his base regen or passive to be equal to that of others would, very simply, make it as if he had no passive at all.

Garen is not overpowered, and sees almost no competitive play whatsoever, as such I see no reason why he should be nerfed in any manner as this would only make him weaker than any other top laner.

Also as a note to the op: When trying to state that you have interviewed people in this regard as a fact, cite you damn sources and put links. Otherwise anyone can say anything about anything and try to pass it off as true. President Obama told me that one himself in a forum reply that I feel no need to source. (see what I did there?)