Talk:Garen/@comment-5414313-20120913190014/@comment-5414313-20120914104118

Thanks for the comments! I wasn't trying to make a guide, I'm not at a level where I can do that yet, I was just checking to see if my ideas were viable.

Trust me. Youmuu's Ghostblade is a HUGE boon to Garen's damage output. Even without armor penetration runes.

It doesn't look like it on paper, but Ghostblade will actually sustain your damage output while you build one or two defensive items. That 15% crit goes a long way.

There are a lot of reasons why Ghostblade works so well now, but basically, I'm pretty sure Garen's changes were made to specifically scale better with this and other older, more typical "Garen" items that we've long since forgotten about.

Basically, the irony, I guess, is that Garen is a lot less item dependent than he used to be. He can do a lot more with less now.

There isn't any one reason for this, it's just that when Riot reworked his kit, they must have reworked it around certain items that people would commonly build on Garen. Morello kind of hinted at this in the patch preview when he mentioned how Garen interacted with the Brutalizer.

The flat armor runes and Doran's Shield work so well on Garen because Decisive Strike does asinine amounts of damage on its own.

The goal in lane is NOT to deal as much damage as possible, but to WIN your TRADES. The flat armor makes it so that you can run up to someone -> autoattack -> Decisive Strike -> run away without them taking off even a hundred health. In other words, because it works so well with Courage at level 2, you'll end up having almost twice the armor as someone else with a cloth armor, and 30% damage reduction on top of that. You'll not only win your trades, but I have effectively bullied an enemy Garen completely out of lane. He had to go to mid to farm because I froze my lane and would wreck him every time he got near me.

That's why the flat armor/MR works better than the AD or armor pen runes. It gives Garen more for less.

You can still get Atma's earlier on too. I prefer rushing Ghostblade, getting Warmog's and Merc Treads and then going Last Whisper, but you can just as easily go Atma's Impaler too. I build LW to anticipate armor stacking, but if the enemy team isn't stacking armor, then my way of doing things actually gets you Atma's just as early as it would otherwise.

Thanks again. :D