Talk:Garen the Night of Demacia/@comment-3546228-20110816121312/@comment-98.252.26.207-20110819050733

Hmm, CDR blues cap it with only Ghostblade and Ionian Boots? Interesting. I never considered that.

Without Spirit Visage, Aegis of the Legion is probably garbage. This leaves you with Hexdrinker, Banshee's Veil and Force of Nature.

So maybe I would go Frozen Mallet, Atma's and Force of Nature. This is one of the rare times where a Force of Nature probably outperforms Banshee's Veil because with a Frozen Mallet, you probably won't need the extra HP, but without shielding runes, you'll definitely need the extra MR to counter magic penetration.

But I feel like this is overall inferior to a Spirit Visage + Aegis of the Legion setup with shielding runes. Ultimately, you end up paying more money for less armor/MR and about the same damage output. Frozen Mallet + Force of Nature just isn't as strong as Spirit Visage + Aegis of the Legion with shielding runes in terms of effective health.

As someone above said, Garen's problem is itemization. It's really difficult fitting a Last Whisper and Bloodthirster into a balanced build. Before the update, Last Whisper was practically core for me, but now I can't honestly justify ever using it (because of the 51 flat armor pen from Ghostblade) unless in some very rare situations that I haven't actually been in yet.

At this current time, we need to just accept that Garen's damage is, at best, "noticeable" late game, but nothing spectacular, even with a Last Whisper. So, our only recourse as Garen players is to end the game as quickly as possible.

This is why I try to build cheaply, but I feel that the Spirit Visage build is actually on par with any late-game Garen build I've seen elsewhere and costs less still.