Garen Skill Priority > > >

Judge your enemies! Hey there! Welcome to my Garen guide! My name is Lordblazer and I'll be attempting to knowledge ya'll about Garen. I play a lot of Top role and Garen is my absolute favourite. By the end of this I hope you will enjoy him as much as I do. Garen is primarily a top lane champion who builds Tank items but deals tons of damage nonetheless.Even if he builds pure damage items, he is still able to get pretty tanky through Runes and his abilities. You are in charge of soaking up all the enemy's damage on the frontlines.

Pros		Cons
+Very Tanky +Lots of damage for a tank +Lots of Sustain +Easy to play		-No mobility related abilities -Can get caught out easily -Weak to poke -Long cooldowns on certain abilities

Primary:

This rune works really well with Garen as it gives more health as well as even more sustain. It's also pretty easy to proc it on Garen. All you got to do is use Decisive Strike on them then auto and gtfo.



This is probably the best rune to choose from. Reduces quite a bit of damage. There's no need to shy away from a fight while you have Bone Plating active.
Nothing much to explain. This rune provides extra armor and magic resistance at 10 minutes making Garen even more tanky.

This rune kinda has a similar effect as your W: Courage. Every 8 minions that die near you grant you bonus permanent HP.Pretty useful for late game.


Garen is usually on the frontlines during temafights, tanking and soaking enemy damage. This usually gets him really low on HP. This rune helps him deal more damage during the fights. Once the fight is done Garen's passive will just get him back to full HP.

Core Items

Black Cleaver: The Black Cleaver is a super useful item which synchronizes really well with Garen. Its first unique passive shreds enemy armor just like Garen's E Judgment. It provides him AD, CDR and HP, while also providing him with additional boosts of speed from the second Unique Passive. This item should be rushed on Garen ASAP.

Sunfire Aegis: Straightforward item. It provides Garen with Armor and HP making him more tanky. Its unique passive is a source of Magic Damage which is useful for farming and during fights.

Item Pool

Dead Man's Plate: Again, an item which makes Garen a lot tankier. Its unique passive increases Garen's damage (the strike after gathering 100 charges) while also increasing his movement speed (only at 100 charges).
Useful item for giving chase especially since the immedeate next attack slows the enemy by 50% for 1 second.

Randuin's Omen: This item grants Garen more armor and HP. However, its unique passive makes it a useful item against champions who have high attack speed such as ADCs. The active slows the movement speed of nearby champions which makes it a useful item for giving chase.

Frozen Heart: Straightforward item. Grants a lot of armor and CDR. The mana is obsolete on garen, however the unique passive makes up for it. Buy this item when enemy team has a lot of high attack speed champions.

Spirit Visage: Buy this item when enemy team is a very AP heavy team or when your laner is AP. It also works well with Garen's passive.

Warmog's Armor: This item is basically another Garen passive. This means the healing is twice as strong. This item also gives Garen more HP and increase base HP regen.

Thornmail: This item works well with Garen since he is a tank who is usually in the midst of battle. The extra armor makes him tankier while the unique passive deals damage to those who attack him.

Sterak's Gage: Again, a useful item in teamfights since Garen is usually tanking a lot damage- burst included. The shield keeps him alive for longer while the tenacity allows him to ignore slows and other movement impairing abilities.

Garen has a pretty strong early game. He can farm decently and has good waveclear with Judgment. He can burst down enemy champions pretty well during early game. Even if he doesn't get too many kills during lane phase, he will be pretty tanky as the game goes on.

With the right items, Garen deals TONS of damage while being super tanky at the same time. Matchups aren't that hard. All you gotta do is farm up. Your W: Courage's passive will give you bonus Armor and MR.

Keep trading and eventually when your enemy is low enough go for the all in. If you start to pop off and you are way ahead of your laner, then you can go ahead and build damage items like Death's Dance and maybe even Ravenous Hydra if you're feeling it.

This is Garen's time to shine. If all goes well, then you have atleast 3-4 items. This means you're suuuuuuper tanky. Note that 2 of your items should be Black Cleaver and Sunfire Aegis. Your abilities paired with these two items will start to shred through enemies, especially squishies like enemy ADC's or Mid laners.

During teamfights, make sure you are wading through enemies cleaving their armor and making sure they are caught in the radius of Sunfire Aegis for more damage. If you happen to see their carry low enough...."DEMACIA". I mean ult them lol. You should be able to kill atleast 2-3 enemies before going down.

If you want to be even more cheese, then build Thornmail(LOL. RIP enemies). Just go and stand in the enemy team and watch them die not you(you will die to obviously lol, dont sue me).
All in all you should be able to win easily unless the rest of your team just plain ints.

8.15: Potential changes to Crit items like Infinity Edge and Stormrazor. Cost of Stormrazor has been lowered and the build path has been changed. May work well with Garen. Infinity Edge changes may also prove kinda beneficial to Garen. More information soon.
8.18: No new changes.
8.22: No new changes.

Thanks ya'll for checking my guide out. Hope I helped you. Any questions or constructive criticism? Drop a comment. Thanks again for viewing this guide and Good luck to ya'll on the rift(or treeline #metoo :) ).