Talk:Garen/@comment-76.92.184.123-20120509184347/@comment-99.230.173.138-20120511045433

It is not as simple as "ulted too early". There is one chance to get a kill in most cases in a lane. If Garen just happens to not have enough damage to get a kill with all of his abilities, the opponent will likely wisely just go back. Maybe you predicted you won't finish them off with your ultimate and saved it. Either way, you don't get a kill. Even if you cast Ignite before you ult them instead, it still can be vital damage that you needed to finish off the target with Demacian Justice. While you have Smite, the things I mentioned can be happening very often. It isn't just "a failure of your skill, not Garen", this game is still a bunch of numbers that you have a limited amount of control over including Garen, and Ignite is important to putting that in your favour for fights.

As a melee champion, last-hits in lane for you happen in one of two ways - you are strategically capable of beating the enemy lane and thus walk up to the minions to farm making Smite's use to be largely irrelevant, or you aren't a good choice for the lane and are quite effectively zoned since getting close to the minions to farm isn't going to work for you without dying to try to do.

And here's some numbers behind my opinion, Smite has a 70 second cooldown. In a 45 minute game, you are capable of using it 38 times. With the mastery for it, that will grant you 380 gold not including the last-hit's worth. A single kill is worth 13.6 melee minions from the first spawn, 18.75 caster minions from the first spawn, or 11.11 siege minions from the first spawn. So if you kill 38 siege minions with it and the mastery, that will grant 1406 gold over the duration of 45 minutes - so that could be worth 4.68 kills. That sounds kinda neat, right?

Except this would require you to use the ability every single time it's off cooldown, and siege minions only spawn every 1.5 minutes instead of being available for every 70 seconds like the figure I stated requires. And this also assumes Smite is used in a way where the last-hits were otherwise unobtainable, since if you can just not use a summoner spell to obtain the last-hits, you should. On the other hand, the value of minions does increase as time goes on... and it also becomes easier to farm later in the game as you'll hit harder to further devalue the use of Smite.

1406 gold is obviously not enough to deal with being zoned out when a carry's target for late-game is to entirely complete their build which is many thousands in gold and going to requires upwards to 300 farm by that time, even including kills and assists, and still the core items of many champions will still be over 6000 gold. When you're zoned out, you're probably going to be losing 70+ farm by the time your turret falls, which becomes a huger loss as the game goes on to the point that happens since those minions become worth more - not to mention the gold you are lacking is not happening to your enemies, allowing them to beat you long before late-game.

Or you could just Ignite out of 15 possible times in a 45 minute game in meaningful ways to get a kill. Obviously, that definitely won't happen. But just using it to get 2 kills (a very likely possibility, on the other hand) over that times makes it significantly more useful than Smite since in addition to giving you gold and XP, a dead player makes it much easier to push and kill than a dead minion every 70 seconds, and as I stated, kills are far from guaranteed even with Garen's ultimate. And you must also consider the problem of laning against an enemy who does have Ignite, who would have a 70-410 true damage lead over you in a head-on fight if you don't.

TLDR; Smite is not worth it over Ignite without some very specific intentions of jungle and buff control, which may be a reasonable idea on its own, but definitely not for just farming in lane.