oftentimes someone on your team needs to do certain jobs. The most flexible champs will be the ones responsible. In garens case, building tanky can help him last and he can still do tons of damage and silences. So if thats whats needed then thats what you get. Normally an additional source of not terribly tanky ad dps is not needed if the carry is where they need to be

I usually go with a spin to crit style build but I always get ga as my 3rd item after boots and infinity edge then frozen mallet phantom dancer and either blood thirster or more defense depending on how I do

I play garen alot a whole lot actually and i have played with different builds, but i use 21/9/0

i build him alot of ways but i mostly build Warmogs/Atmas on him, and usually go for IE afterwards. with MR boots, unless i need tabi. I sometimes build him with Frozen Mallet/LW , with GA or FON, i sometimes add FON to my mogs/atmas/ie build, but its alot of money. I dunno i really like going MOGS/Atmas though.

The problems with tank Garen have been well illustrated. The chief problem with AD carry Garen (boots, IE, Ghostblade, BT, BT, LW) is that he is too squishy to get there. That is, a decent team will focus him at range, kill him quickly, and move on to the rest of the team.

However, Spin-crits do warrant an IE, and since he scales w/ health, Atmogs might be on the ticket too.

omg i hate it in champ select when I say "ill go tank" and some idiot garen is like "no im the tank"and im like "are you f***ing kidding me?" nice CC. I still end up going jungle tank maokai anyways, since garen is just going full ****** thinking hes a real tank. annoys the hell out of me.

and silence is not a form of CC. silence is made to independantly benefit the champ given the silence. garen has the silence to be able to stay on enemies with his spin, so they cant dash away. IF anyone thinks a champ who has a silence = viable for tank, then go play tank talon. for f**ks sake tank kassadin is more viable than tank garen

I've been playing garen since he first came out and I feel I've found a great balance with him and done fairly well with him. I've noticed that everyone has a different approach with him and my approach hasnt been mentioned yet so i'll share my method as well.

The way I see garen is not as a tank (cuz I dont believe in the term and role for this game, i'd rather break it up into initiator and controllers) but as a guerilla tactics fighter. his kit supports this fighting style very well. the idea is he'll jump into the battle full force and do quite a bit of burst damage, then run out once its done. so hes got decisive strike to jump into the battle and close the gap and does his inital damage while silencing the target, making them unable to get away for a few seconds and must take the damage. then you have judgement to deal the damage while they're stuck in range. while courage is there to help you survive the inital hit. then afterwards you have your ultimate to finish off your target if they're low enough or you run out and get out of combat to heal up with your passive. rinse and repeat till opponent is dead.

so thats why I feel he should be played this way cuz thats how his kit makes him strong. so now i'll list the type of stats im looking for. (in order of importance)

1. hp, it has great synergy with his passive and also will get extended by courage's natural resistances with the passive and active abilities of it. since his passive regens health by a % of his max health, the higher your health is, the more hp your regenerating every second and that means you'll be able to get back into battle sooner without worries.

2. crit chance, since your abilities are able to crit, you want to capitilize on it. I put crit chance runes on him so that early game my judgement will be able to do massive damage right off the back. also since Im playing him in a gurellia tactic style, I want to do as much burst damage as possible.

3. AD, all his abilities except his ultimate is AD based and have great scaling. also you want the high burst damage so that you can kill your opponent quickly.

4. CDR, cooldowns are the only cost to his abilities, the more you can lower it, the more you can use it to help farm without worrying about it being on cooldown when you need it for a battle. and the faster you can farm, the quicker you can get your items to cause more damage

5. armor/magic resistance - you want this but you dont want to go overboard. only get items that have one of the above stats so that you can gain the most out of the item such as atma's impaler, sunfire cape, Maw of Malmortius or Force of nature (though this will be removed soon) and avoid things like wit's end or frozen heart (though in some situations it could be ok, though its probably best to be taken by someone else)

Stats to Avoid completely are:

AP - for obvious reasons, he gains nothing from it

Attack speed - cuz this style is gurilla tactics, almost all your damage is coming out of your abilites and less of your auto attacks, so attack speed will not improve your damage at all.

Lifesteal - again same reason as above, your about burst damage from abilities, so theres no benefits here. your not gonna be gaining much from this stat at all.

and of coures anything that has to do with mana. cuz you aint got non

so some example builds i've done are (in order of importance, end items will be optional/situational)
boots of swiftness (of course merc boots are viable and some times prefered depending on the enemy composition)
Infinity edge
Frozen Mallet (these 3 are my must have in every game)
Maw of Malmortius/Atma's impaler (depending on the damage type I get killed by most or both if the enemy is fairly balanced)
Force of nature/Rundin's omen ( again, depending on damage type i've been taking, and how the enemy behaves)
Sunfire cape if I need the additional health and armor is required.
youmuu's ghostblade (if I have the space)
Lord Van Damm's Pillage (if im on TT)

I've been playing a bit of Garen lately...and I've gotta admit. AD Garen is really legit.

I didn't believe it until I heard Stonewall talk about playing it at the Platinum level. But I tried it and I gotta say...it is legit.

A simple tabi or mercs will give Garen around 100 resist/armor against your lane opponent...and that's all you really need to survive long enough to bonk, spin, execute and kill them...

I've gone to using the build boots+3> merc/tabi> brutalizer>ghostblade>cloth armor/nullmage>IE>aegis

And it's treated me really really well...

cause of his skillset, yes u can kill the entire enemy team if u manage to reach them but due to garen's lack of hard cc or engages anyone who's competent would just nuke him down before he reaches the team since he's gonna have to walk into them to engage in the first place.
it's the same reason why no one plays master yi when he's got the highest damage potential in the game simply because he'd get blown up before he reached the enemy.