Talk:Garen/@comment-81.51.229.170-20120925093231/@comment-5414313-20120925161029

Most of the LoL community is clueless when it comes to playing Garen.

Garen is deceptively hard to play because you don't build him the way you would build other tanky DPS characters. Garen is extremely reliant on items like Youmuu's Ghostblade that are so often overlooked, while a lot LESS reliant on items you would think would be great on him, such as Atma's and Maw.

I mean, look at the most recent guide on Solomid.net. That guy suggests building Triforce on Garen. Triforce? What?

When you add to this that Garen has no real escapes or initiations outside of Flash, and no real CC, thus making teamfights very difficult to get into and even harder to escape from, Garen is actually quite tricky.

It's not tricky to build full tank and do nothing for your team but be a nearly unkillable presence, but it's tricky to play Garen and actually *do* something.

Garen's laning phase now after the rework buffed his early game so much, it's just that in order to realize this, you need to be quite skilled at the game as a whole. You need to know about lane freezing, lane control, baiting, et al. and if you don't use the Indomitable and Tough Skin masteries, half of Garen's early game strategy flies completely out the window.

Combine this with most guides recommending 21/9/0 masteries and you can get disastrous results.

Is Garen viable? Very. Does he have an a very high skill cap to play well? Surprisingly yes.