Talk:Garen the Night of Demacia/@comment-4019444-20110714025939/@comment-3457312-20110714203624

Yeah, I like HP/Tanky-DPS Garen over straight tank Garen. I'll describe the general order of how I build him.

I usually always start off with the following initial core items: boots, brutalizer, and phage. With those three items you have a nice balance of HP and damage. After determining where the game is headed, then build appropriately from there. From these items, I generally next upgrade in Frozen Mallet and purchase a Negatron cloak to mitigate magic damage. If I'm not threatened by magic damage, then I jump immediately into Atma's Impaler to get a substantial DPS damage. By mid-game, expect: Tier 2 Boots, Frozen Mallet, Brutalizer, Atma's Impaler and Negatron Cloak. Hopefully, the game ends around this time. If not, then finish the build according to how the game is going, but most of the time I'll end up upgrading cloak into Banshee's Veil (or Force of Nature) and purchase Sunfire Cape or Infinity Edge as my last item. You can get essentially any item as your sixth that you think is practical for a tanky-DPS Garen, but I've been digging Infinity Edge lately.

I've done straight tank Garen a few times, but it's not that great. The way I see it is if you want to build a tank, then why would you choose Garen? There are so many other champions out there who fill the role as main tank so much more efficiently. Garen, imo, has a niche role in which the player has to find a balance between leaning towards tanky (not tank!) or DPS in each game to be of most use. If you're owning and reading your opponents well, then continue on building DPS and own even more. If you're being targeted often, but find that you're diverting damage away from your teammates who are using the opportunity to own the enemies, then build a little tankier to stand around fights longer. This is why it's important to purchase items accordingly, rather than follow a cookie-cut path every single game.