Hello I am SUPERMOVA and I am a diamond Garen ONLY one trick pony on the EUW region. Garen is a juggernaut which means he is a champion with decent close combat damage and tankiness to absorb lots of punishment. When Garen can get ahead he can turn into a raid boss monster that becomes unkillible while also dishing out alot of damage from the melee range. In lower elos Garen can be a champion that is hard to deal with because nobody in this elo range can not consistently keep Garen at a distance or understand his power spikes.

The biggest issue with Garen after playing him from silver v to diamond v is that Garen has the most flawwed kit in all of league of legends.What I mean by this is that there has never been a master tier+ Garen main or one trick pony since the beginning of league of legends. Garen is far too binary of a champion and provides nothing for your team when behind. Garen's early game is extremely weak so you have to play passive in every single lane, and you are not rewarded for playing passively as Garen as his late game is very weak too since every champion late game will have some form of resistance and peel so Garen's combo wont penetrate through this in the time required to kill anybody.

This guide is to inform you what I do/did to get to diamond playing Garen only, and show you effective ways to climb with Garen.

PROS:
-VERY tanky
-A %health true damage execute ultimate
-Good base damage
-Q clenses ALL slows

CONS:
-Very kitable
-No combat sustain
-Very weak early + late game
-Has next to no good matchups
-Weak damage compared to the rest of the juggernauts
-close to useless in team fights if can't reach a carry - next to 0 utility to provide team (only a 1 second silence every 6 seconds).
-E- judgement does less damage than autoattacks at early levels

Q should be maxed ASAP in pretty much every game. Maxing E is a noob trap and is very common with new Garen players. The reason you max Q is because of the more frequent, consistent burst damage from Q, and the bonus movement speed + duration of bonus movement speed as you keep leveling up Q. Don't forget shorter cooldowns so more silence spams. This also allows you to get to lane faster since I never go teleport.

Maxing E is bad now as your E scales more with your champion level rather than spell level. Your E does less damage than an auto attack at rank 1 E. However you should max this ability second for the extra ticks on judgement to quickly proc the 4 ticks of judgement 25% armor shred. Don't forget you deal 33% extra damage against only 1 target getting hit aswell as your E allowing you to move through units.

Your W should be the last thing that gets maxed, however you should put 1 point into your W at level 2 or 3 depending on how hard you're getting bullied in lane. Your W allows you to reduce all incoming damage by 30% and the more levels you put into W the longer the damage reduction lasts. Your W Courage has a passive that gives you a total of 30 armor and MR when fully stacked by killing minions.

Your Ultimate Demacian Justice being the %missing health damage execute it is. Level this whenever you possibly can. The lower the health of the champion you are trying to execute the better. If your target is not the villain they will only take magic damage which can be reduced through magic resistance in particular hexdrinker that completely stops Garen's ult if not villain. If the target is the villain you will dish out HUGE %missing health true damage which if your target is low enough health will provide a execute indicator that will get bigger the more likely your ult with execute the villain.

Your passive Perseverance is your only form of sustain, however, this is only out of combat sustain. You need to have not taken damage for a certain period of time to start the passive. The passive scales with your max health. At early levels the sustain you recieve is barely noticable until later levels of the game, which depending on your items and buffs can be very hard to deal with if you back off from a fight for a matter of seconds before regenerating your entire health bar back to full.

You will see EVERY single game I run ignite flash. This is because this is the best summoners combo for Garen from what i've tested.

Ignite is very important as since Garen's early game is utter dog****, running ignite gives you some form of lane pressure and kill potential. If you are around silver elo and looking to hardcarry your games then ignite will allow you to do so. I'm a very agro laner I must mention so playing around ignite is important for me.
Many Garen players think just because they are top laners they are enforced to run teleport top. This is the case for pretty much all top laners but Garen. The past TP nerf made it so tp bot lane plays are a lot trickier to pull off, and Garen has no form of making any plays botlane as 1 CC and you look like a fool wasting the summoner. If you max Q as I said earlier you will get to lane pretty quickly.

Flash is just simply a must on Garen. I've seen some people try ghost on Garen but it simply wont do ****. Flash is your only way of closing Gaps and giving you some outplay potential with Garen's Q-Flash-E tick-Ult which hardly anybody has the reaction speed to deal with it nor can they since they're silenced until they are dead. If you don't run flash at all you're a fool.