I can’t wait for the Garen nerf
Despite early claims that Garen was balanced, just that people were finally learning to use him, Riot has admitted that Garen may be a little too strong at everything he does. It is just a tad ridiculous for him to be able to buy survivability items and completely melt an entire team. Also, the fact that his W has both a passive damage reduction buff and an active seems like overkill.
Lucky for us, he’s catching a nerf, and I can’t wait. It’s not the Garens that dominate games that are causing the problems. It’s the other Garens, the people who think they know how to play Garen, that are the issue. You’ve probably seen them trying to tank three people at level five, turret diving from level one, and stacking armor against completely magic based enemies.
It’s not a problem unique to Garen. Any time the community realizes a given champ is overpowered, players do anything they can to play him, even if they don’t know the champion. It’s already starting to happen with Kog’Maw. The little alien got a buff and now a lot of people who had previously ignored him are both picking and banning him. It’s a trend we’ll probably see nearly as often as there’s a significant patch. For now, though, I’m happy to wait on the Garen nerf, and when it becomes a problem with other champions, I’ll anxiously await their nerf patches as well.
Posted in: Champions, Development, league of legends
Tags: balance, champion nerfs, garen, garen fix, garen nerf, garen op, garen up, kog'maw, kog'maw buff, kog'maw nerf, nerf
yeah, he is a bit strong; I really enjoy playing with him, he only sucks if he falls really behind, which rarely happens anymore. he’s a lot like xin in my opinion – built-in tanking potential with strong dps AND anti-tank options
every character that is considered overpowered is just the flavor of the week, ie, the most annoying character and most often played.
I haven’t seen a bad Garen in quite a while. I’ve frequently found myself congratulating the Garen on enemy teams in matches than I win, because they are like 15/4/7 or something. He is definitely obnoxious and yeah… it’s strange – on paper he really doesn’t look that impressive, but he turns out well.
I should have said this in the post, but I think the issue with Garen is that he can have great stats even if he plays like an idiot. That’s a character design problem in my mind. I see a LOT of Garen players with scores like the 15-4 you mention but they are constantly out of position, neglect to push after team fights, ignore respawn timers and just generally compromise your team’s chances to win. It’s counterbalanced by the fact that he is one of the most durable champions and he can build survivability items that provide him a mix of magic and physical damage that is very difficult to build against.
I wouldn’t call myself a great Garen player (heck, it took me a couple weeks just to get good with him), but I love playing him for the LULZ. Nothing is more epic than finishing off an enemy with Demacian Justice!
I love me some Garen, but mainly on TT (where he is often banned). That said I played in an epic comeback last night and between Rammus and I (Morgana) + dps we could handle most of their team but it is damn hard to prevent Garen from getting away.
As an aside that Rammus was my first really successful case of talking to a player in-game about what they’re doing wrong and watching them fix it (he was focusing tanks, soloing during teamfights, not initiating and was always the first to run .. wow). That was sweet in and of itself. I do hope they don’t nerf Morg, running into a teamfight after 2 seconds, pressing R then using Zhonya’s ring then hearing “Quadra-Kill” is great fun.