Talk:Garen the Night of Demacia/@comment-4304118-20110820035524/@comment-98.252.26.207-20110822163205

Is 3% movement speed really worth losing everything you get from the offensive and defensive trees?

Looking at the offensive tree, there seems to be a lot of wasted points here.

Good Hands and Perseverance are not essential on Garen. Perseverance is largely considered horrible because it's misleading. It sounds like you're getting more than you really are, even on Garen, whose passive becomes less and less useful the longer the game goes on.

Awareness is excellent, so +1 there, but again, not essential. Especially not essential on Garen, who can amass loads of XP with his passive.

Greed is crap for a lot of reasons. While we can argue it helps somewhat, it's really designed to be combined with gold/10 items or avarice quints. Does it really help as much as the offensive tree does? Is it worth dipping so far into the utility tree for? Certainly not.

Utility Mastery is eh. The duration on the neutral monster buffs is awesome, but since many Garens build Frozen Mallet anyway, it ends up being wasted. Even if it's not wasted, it's better to put that red on somebody else much of the time.

So the only thing you're really getting here is the 3% movement speed, and you're not even dipping far enough into the utility tree to get Improved Flash, Intelligence, or Presence of the Master, which are arguably more useful to Garen than Sunder and Archaic Knowledge.

You end up losing a noticeable amount of damage and +6 armor/MR. Ouch.

But the utility tree itself might be more useful to Garen if we go 9/0/21 for Improved Flash and the CDR. Garen is really Flash dependent, and the extra CDR is always good.

This gives us the ability to use Movement Speed quints and replace Ghostblade with a Last Whisper because we reach 40% CDR with some Celerity or Focus runes. 9 Focus runes give us 39.85% CDR with only Ionian Boots and Spirit Visage. 7 Celerity runes give us 40% CDR, but only at level 18. The benefit of this, though, is we can add some Shielding runes here to give us about 5 more MR, so it's like getting a free Resistance mastery here.

So we can officially ditch Ghostblade with this setup and replace it with Last Whisper, which is cheaper and might end up giving us more overall damage output than the offensive tree.

You're welcome!

Now we can have Last Whisper, 40% CDR, and great survivability.

We can add an Aegis of the Legion to this, Atma's Impaler and Bloodthirster, and we have:

9/0/21, Ionian Boots, Spirit Visage, Aegis of the Legion, Last Whisper, Atma's Impaler, Bloodthirster. Those are not in any particular order.

Our armor becomes 180 and our MR becomes 152 with Courage's passive. Our HP is about 2,700. We have 314 AD and a flat 18 armor pen, and finally 40% from Last Whisper.

Total cost is 12,170, not including any Doran's Blades bought or sold in the beginning.