Talk:Garen/@comment-4499945-20120906010100/@comment-216.58.9.28-20120906041638

Pretty much how you're meant to play him. Xypherous said Garen needed to walk a fine line of damage and durability to be useful, and the changes were made accordingly to make that easier.

Dunno about Fratma's or Atmog's anymore though since Garen needs more armour and magic resistance to just break even with old Courage's gains (you need 125 just to get the 25 it used to give you), and obviously values past that are even better, while Garen doesn't need quite as much damage as he did before since a greater percentage of Judgement is able to critical strike now.

The passives of Force of Nature, Randuin's Omen, Guardian Angel or Aegis of the Legion seem pretty hard to pass up to me while scaling well with Courage, and Frozen Mallet is only going to be useful if you manage to hit them at all, which will be harder due to aforementioned squishiness.

Lastly, Decisive Strike has a much lower cooldown and downtime now, and Ghostblade is a better buy on Garen now when you were more likely to ignore it in favour of Last Whisper before or just didn't have space/gold for Ghostblade in between Last Whisper, Infinity Edge and Fratma's/Atmog's, so even if you don't get Force of Nature and Randuin's Omen as your way of benefiting from Courage and helping you move, Garen is probably much better at getting into range and keeping in it these days, lessening the need for Frozen Mallet's slow.

Not to say Fratma's shouldn't be gotten on Garen, but it seems like a more circumstantial thing to me than a sort of go-to build.