Talk:Garen the Night of Demacia/@comment-92.96.207.10-20110721202145/@comment-98.252.26.207-20110722125418

Well, there are a few reasons for this.

In order for Garen to be viable, he needs some early/mid-game survivability. Even if you wanted to build him DPS, chances are the game won't last long enough. So this leads people to build him tankier than he needs to be, and when everyone is playing a carry, he's forced to try to be the party's EXTREMELY INEFFICIENT damage soak. Annoying, but it's what happens.

Also, I'd like to point out the importance of runes on Garen. If you don't have runes, you can't build DPS effectively, so newer players are forced to build Garen tankiner than 30's with armor/MR runes.

I capitalized that so people who read this page realize how terrible he is at tanking. Garen's survivability is for his own benefit, not yours.

People also simply don't know how to build him. :O

I stand by what I say when I say Sunfire Cape is a bad item on Garen. A great item in general, but a bad item on Garen. This is because Sunfire Cape is great if you need both armor and HP, but Garen only needs HP. With runes, masteries and mercury's treads, his armor/MR values are insanely high when you max Courage (which is very easy to do~). This is why most Garens use Shielding runes - it gives him over 100 MR with the Resistance mastery, Courage, and nothing else on at level 18. This is also why Boots of Swiftness are viable on him.

People see Sunfire Cape and think, "Oh, HP and armor. That's great!" But they don't plan ahead and their late-game suffers because they didn't build enough damage. But one of the best things about Garen is that if you build him right, he's virtually unkillable, so he needs something tanky.

I've been doing some testing, but I'm still fighting health issues so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but...

An early Frozen Mallet is great on him. Probably the best defensive item that synergizes with his late-game. It seems to have roughly the same effect as a Sunfire + a Negatron Cloak. Add Atma's to this and it's overall better, and saves an item slot. But I feel that in order to achieve this, you need runes.