Talk:Garen the Night of Demacia/@comment-99.240.60.236-20110612190013/@comment-38.116.202.8-20110615151635

Yes, it is. Decisive Strike is one ability, that stops him from critting, which makes it not that useful for damage after getting enough attack damage, Judgement discourages building attack speed leaving either Garen's Judgement or his autoattacks weak. Courage is a nifty 36% damage reduction for it's duration, but unless it's not very useful unless Garen's got enough durability. If Garen has too much durability, his damage will be weak by the end-game. So, you build tanky with some damage and be kinda weak in two manners rather than be useless in one. His ultimate is pretty good early-game what with bushes allowing you to get close and only two opponents with low magic resistance, but when everyone starts getting a Banshee's Veil, Demacian Justice's window to kill someone plummets. There are no items which only give magic penetration (save for boots, but being hand-to-hand-ranged makes Garen either need extra speed or CC reduction from Swiftness or Mercury), and the other stats that you pay for on the magic penetration items would lead to a lot of wasted gold on Garen. It will still be a reasonable nuke late-game, but only comparable to a single one from a caster with a core build. You know, not very ultimate-y. AND, the range's short, making getting in range to use it with Garen only having a speed buff and slow removal to get through entire teams to hit anyone weak enough to kill with it to be tough in the first place. Really, Demacian Justice sucks late-game. When it kills someone then, it is frequently clear overkill.

I used to think a 1.5 AD and 1.2 AD ratio would be pretty awesome too. But when you look into health and armour scaling with levels (and maybe a Thornmail/Zhonya's Hourglass), as well as attack speed being a frequent stat available on abilities and items, lots of other fighters overtake Garen easily late-game. Garen would overtake other fighters by a nifty few hundred damage in the 3 seconds on Judgement along with Decisive Strike discounting armour, but when everyone can take more damage later and armour reducing that advantage, Garen's damage really just sucks late-game, while pretty much every other fighter gets ahead of Garen on damage right after Judgement ends (of which Garen will be ahead...by a bit.) as he can't attack while using it, and his attacks on their own won't be very good. They also usually have a lot more utility than Garen's silence and ultimate (that doesn't work very well late-game) as well.

Garen's early-game is great! He does lots of damage with no items, Courage is useful durability and Demacian Justice is a very reliable kill-securer. But his late-game, is completely awful.