Hi everyone.

I just recently picked up Garen and I'm wondering if there's a viable melee DPS item build for him.

If anyone would like to give me some pointers that would be great.

Thanks.

Garen doesn't really function as a DPS. He dishes out about the same amount of damage when built as a tank and that way, he can.... tank. He has 1 small MS buff, no slow/snare/stun, and Judgement shouldn't even be considered helpful to a melee DPS build because it prevents you from autoattacking for its duration, severely gimping your damage output. Now when your a tank, Judgement is great because it is increasing your damage for that whole duration, while also removing/shortening slows. Sure you can build infinity edge and youmuu's on him and kill people, especially if you're not summoner level 30 yet and people are still learning how to play, but you can also get kills as a tank and be 20 times harder to kill.

Brutalizer + 1 sunfire is a good start, or LastWhisper + 1 sunfire scales better into lategame. After that FoN, IE, whatever suits the game. For AD items both the Brutalizer+Ghostblade path (better midgame) or the LastWhisper+IE path (better lategame) are decent. You DO need to mix with tank items though and I would still recommend 1 sunfire..

Latest patch totally ****ed Garen... he's no longer a solid tank/off-tank because of change to judgement. It's like Riot thought they could make him into a DPS, but the evil Yordles tricked them into forgetting to give Garen any form of CC/gap closer/chase.

Ive been using boots, sunfire, phantom dancer, either merc. treads or berserker greaves, then FoN then another phantom dancer. Its random but its done wonders for me

The last nerf pretty much killed Garen. I used to play him a lot but now you judgement into a squishies face and they just laugh. Plus with no initiate you're pretty screwed. You can try stacking AD but then you're for sure gonna die. You can stack tanky items but you won't kill anyone except for your R which is still good. I wouldn't worry about CDR, just focus on AD and maybe AS and take anything tanky you can get. Sunfire as people mentioned should be core.

Thank you guys I'll have to try out some of these builds as I've just been using the recommended items for the handful of games I've used him in.

Here is what I do.
Start with pendant of regeneration and decisive strike. Last hit as much as you can, your goal is to save up roughly 1300 to get a heart of gold and boots.

Continue to last hit in the laning phase and occasionally get wards.

Items in order I get them.
Sun fire (health belt first survival helps in farming)
Merc Treads
force of nature or thorn mail. I get both these items but if enemy has allot of DPS get thorn mail first.
Atmas impaler
Finish Radamans omen.
If enemy is heavy magic use g angel instead of impaler and banshee instead of thorn mail.

Hopefully your team will be decent and you can keep pushing enemy to win. Idea during team fights is to find which dps/or mage is strongest on enemy team and run after them. Force them out of the fight or kill them.

I don't know why people complain about garen nerf it just made his role more of a attack tank. Apposed to tank like rammus who is defensive and cc people. Or can spin over teams with no item strategy by stacking sun fires.

I wouldnt play Garen right now, all you can do is run around dealing 40 damage/sec and killsteal.

Stop building Garen as a tank - he's not a tank. He never was a tank. He never will be a tank. He is tanky DPS. How can you tank with no CC minus a melee-hit silence, and not a single initiation skill? Just hope the enemy sticks around long enough for you to spin around like a fool, yelling out your home town name?

I'd give Brutalizer + Youmuu's + Randuin's or Banshee's, and then some more AD items like infinity edge.

Amazing that Garen actually needs to build for damage to actually deal damage now. Sounds like every other champion I know. Maybe it's time to come out of the bushes?