The best nerf of this patch is... The garen nerf. Now he cant be so impossible to kill now and will be easier to counter. The Darius nerf is too far, the other nerfs are pretty pointless,, but garen is now more balanced than ever.

So youre gonna pretend that 20% of his base armor and MR is all that made you suck?

Actually, the garen nerf is a good nerf to him early game and late game is roughly the same garen before the patch.

When I played garen, I always took this first, why? increase survival is important top lane. now, I maybe looking into still taking this first or taking his spin first (E).

Garen has always been boarder line strong to OP. If Garen gets a few kills in quick; say 2 or 3 before level 6, he is too easy to shutdown his lane and finish the game early, not many champions with 2-3 kills can do what a 2-3 kill garen does, especially if garen get the first kill as that's bonus gold.

Garen is also the most predictable and easy to shut down top laner in the entire game.

Should get Q first. Can't trade against anything without it. Spin at level 1 is pretty bad too because its values will just be really low. After that, you of course gotta max spin because you again can't trade against anything without it.

The Darius nerf was too much? Lmao. He basically has the exact same ult, he just can't cast it again after 12 seconds. Same teamfight potential, same Darius. Lol..

wut? how are they the same?

I love people seriously crying over the Darius nerf.

"The Darius nerf is too much."

How on earth is it too much? His level 3 ult was reduced to 80 CDR instead of flat 100 all levels, it deals the SAME AMOUNT OF DAMAGE, and in the end you only can't wait as long as you want to cast your ult again, you have 12 seconds.

A WHOLE 12 SECONDS. DEAR GOD RIOT THAT'S A HUGE NERF RIOT PLS

Its quite the empty nerf, actually a buff if the Darius can change his strategy, since he cant snowball in lane like before by a small margin. I mean, the only thing that happens is that Darius has to force a teamfight/skirmish to snowball. Because, let's be realists, what teamfights/skirmishes lasts more that 12 secs? Darius few times snowball in lane, they snowball in teamfights way quicker. So the nerf ends up as a buff to the CD of Noxian Guillotine.

TL;DR-> The new ult mechanic of 12 secs isnt really a nerf, since Darius snowballs better in teamfights, that arent that long. That leaves the ''nerf'' as a buff if Teamfights are forced earlier.

I don't think you quite understand why Darius was nerfed. { Not to mention his Ult previously would have been better in teamfights anyways, since if it was perfectly executed every time anyways he'd still have it up after the teamfight. }

Darius was nerfed because he had a snowball presence in lane that was god awful to play again, as in if you got one death from him past level 6 and you weren't rushing health items, you're most likely going to die, again and again and again.

Now let me put this bluntly, Darius is a pretty easy champ to counter and to play against, but he has definite counters, and champions he definitely counters. They wanted to attempt to remove some of that lane-bully presence, and they did exactly what they wanted to do, they pretty much removed the option of Darius to simply repeatedly kill someone every time they returned to lane, now it's around every minute after they get to lane giving them the option to farm up a tad and recall so they can come back with a health item or something that may help them win a trade versus Darius.

People complaining about the Nerf often feel that the nerf was too big of a hit because of the way that Darius falls off by mid-late game unless he has ungodly amounts of kills. He's a champion who simply has issues carrying against people that know what they're doing because they'll simply Kite Darius to death. The best way to mitigate this is to pick up something like a Randuins; but most people are just comfortable with being kited to death and building a standard build.

Overall this hurt Darius's chance to really dominate his lane and try to force a 4v5 shutout. Which was the only 'great' strategy he was really involved in, where he could turn a game into a 4v5 and try to end the game before his opponent can recover;

Moving on from this, Garen probably should never start with anything other than Q, because it prevents him from being able to put on any kind of early pressure if he grabs W or E at level one. It gives him everything he needs for the early laning phase, a soft-cc cleanse { Slow} Alongside some pretty nice damage for a level one champion, not to mention that it also gives him the option to run from an early gank or deny ganks from champions who only have a singular slow-cc, such as Xin Zhao who is currently very popular. I could think of a few unpopular jungles that also have singular soft CC's but that'd be kind of irrelevant.