Talk:Garen/@comment-69.244.210.223-20120514081509/@comment-69.244.210.223-20120515152434

^ Garen doesn't deal high burst damage, so he needs time to dish out his pain. A lot of champions also have escapes. If you scale his silence on his Q, he will be destroyed early game.

His problem late game is his contribution in a teamfight. Unlike Riven, he can't unload hell in a couple of seconds. Unlike Jax or Lee Sin, he can't gap close onto a priority target. Garen does have a great single target CC, but he has to reach his target first, which generally won't happen if the enemy is any good.

Immunity to disables makes Garen squishier but allows him to actually have a purpose in a teamfight.

Regarding its similarity to Olaf's ultimate, Olaf has massive passive APen, far more resists, 8 second duration, and can activate it while CC'd. Please. The only similarity is thematic. Morello has talked about this, and said that the arguments of "this ability is OP because X champion already has it" aren't valiid because of 2 reasons:

1) Each ability synergizes differently with the rest of the kit, which is why cross champion comparisons are difficult

and

2) Having an ability in your kit does not grant you some sort of trademark on its theme. He then went on to give examples of overlapping concepts in abilities between not only champions, but items as well (ex. Zilean's ult + GA).

With 15% CDR, Garen at rank 5 E has about 7 seconds cooldown inbetween E's. During this time, he does nearly zero damage. A 1 second reduction would help with this. This will help make Garen more of a threat in a teamfight. Currently, he bursts about half the health off of some enemies, then he goes into useless mode, and the teamfight is over by the time his E is ready again.

R- physical damage seemed like a good idea at first, but in fact it is not. By level 6, most enemies in lane will have 100+ armor vs. a Garen, and Garen never has a LW at this point. Changing his ult to physical damage would be a huge nerf on his early game. Late game, he may or may not see significant damage gains on the ult. Opponents won't usually have more than ~110 MR and ~ 150 armor. Garen's early game is strong and his late game is comparably weak, but I don't think this is the direction that needs to be taken to address the problem. His kit's design is inferior to champions like Riven and Jax when it comes to late game contriubtions. His late game can be helped but this fact won't change. He can't afford to compromise his early game because that's where he is supposed to shine.

These changes aren't meant to strengthen his early game appreciably, but they are meant to give him a purpose in a teamfight and make him a little more active in today's burst-centric meta.