Talk:Garen/@comment-5476695-20131122182341/@comment-6016076-20131126120207

I want to run treads, Cleaver, FH, GA, Atmas, IE in some order. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet, though. I am on the fence between Atma's and Sunfire's. I guess it depends on how ahead you are in lane if you need the short-term advantage from Sunfire's, but the Atma's will scale harder because it's so efficient on Garen even if he doesn't build heatlh.

On building health vs. Resist:

Resist stacking is significantly more efficient on Garen than health stacking if you do the math due to W passive as well as W active becoming significantly more efficient the higher your resists are. At around 200 resists, Courage is better than Rammus Defensive Curl.

Stacking health for your passive seems to be a red herring. Perhaps in the laning phase it might be better, but it's definitely bad outside of the laning phase. Consider: 1500 hp with 150 resists vs. 2k hp vs. 100 resists. You are regenerating 2 more hp per second, but taking 15% more damage. Altogether, the passive regen in higher resist scenario amounts to 15 effective hp per second vs. 16 effective hp per second from the health stacking scenario. Then you consider that the passive is inactive in combat, as well as that resist stacking as mentioned above does a lot more for your survivability.

I can't see any reason to stack health on Garen considering resists go better with his passive as well as with his W for actual survivability. For another example, even FH vs. Randuin's has FH granting more physical survivability than Randuin's while W is up. Not saying mine is the best build as there are obvious arguments for certain scenarios such as W being down, health applying to both damage types etc, but it's up to you decide where you think it's worth it.