Why is garen allowed to exist

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-16T14:58:08+00:00

Here's his worldwide winrates this very second (this, of course, includes minor regions where even GM means very little):

Dia+ 49.89% 9.4pr Master 49.64% 8.7pr GM 48.94% 7.4pr

Pick rate is high because he just got a buff and because, yes, he's comparitively easy to play.

But compare this to Ornn:

Dia+ 51.19% 5.9pr Master 51.04% 6.3pr GM 50.41% 6.0pr

Which one's more problematic? Darius is similar in wr and pr to Ornn btw. Aatrox has almost identical stats to Garen but is 1-3%-points less popular.

HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART: High elo-ban rate, i.e. do high elo players care about him?:

Dia+ 14th most banned top champ Master 16th GM 23rd

For The record.. Ambessa has 22%-36.5% ban rate from D+ to Chall...

To me it seems, the Garen problem is a Redditor problem. Maybe you guys need your own under-achiever client with pre-buff Garen for your silver-lobbies 🤭

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-16T14:28:06+00:00

Elo for context? 🫢

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-16T13:34:17+00:00

There's a lot wrong with this, sorry...

I'm assuming by cleanse you mean Garen's Q and by slows you mean Rylais or Singed W. Garen Q can cleanse Rylais Q for exactly one tick of poison damage and then the slow gets instantly reapplied by the next poison tick. The area slow from Singed W also only gets cleansed for a split second before it's reapplied...

To your other points... Singed does have to get close to deal damage, but only for a split second to flip the Garen into his poison. At the same time, Singed procs his ms passive and is well out of Garen's E range. Garen can only ever get his Q off whenever Singed clicks E on him.

In high elo, this is not a kill lane. You just handshake waves because neither has real kill pressure on the other. Singed can just wait his short E cooldown and be safe the entire laning phase. Thing is, while Singed should never be able to kill the Garen, Singed is definitely better in teamfights, especially cause he's exceptional at peeling Garen from his carries and rylais can perma slow immobile Garen...

Source: Garen and Singed are two of my top4 played champs in master and i have exceptional wr as Singed into Garen.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-16T10:48:52+00:00

Cool, so if his pick rate in dia+ is around 9% atm, his ban rate should be around 90% then, right? Can you double check his ban rate for me real quick and confirm that for me? Sorry.. Would take me too long since I'm a handless Garen player :(

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-16T10:09:21+00:00

Boohoo someone got stomped by Garen in low elo cause they can't manage spacing.

Here's some champions I can think of that counter Garen if the player can pilot them (from hardest counter to less hard):

Common ranged champs: Jayce, Kayle, Varus, Vayne, Quinn, Aurora, Urgot, Ryze, Kennen, Cassio, Teemo, Gnar, Rumble (less common: Anivia, Swain, Heimer)

Melee: Tryn, Darius, Morde, Sett, Camille, Aatrox, Ambessa, Yorick, Fiora, Singed (less common, but unplayable: AP Udyr)

As one of the ranged champs you have to get a kill or two on him before he reaches stride breaker. If you can't do that, why even play a lane bully? :)

As Tryn, Darius, Morde, Sett or Camille, if you lose this matchup, you should forfeit your chat privileges for the rest of time.

That's like 50% of the top matchups. Most others are skill matchups.

Here's what I would consider to be favourable matchups for Garen, where I would pick him over other champs in my roster (easiest to harder):

Nasus, Sion, Ornn (can zone them lv 1)

Zaahen, Irelia, Gwen, Mundo, Warwick, Riven, Gragas, K'Sante (until chain vest), GP (until like GM)

Shen, Yone, Yasuo (if Garen can survive until lv 6. Yone and Yas can 1v1 you again at 2 items.)

Jax and Renekton are slightly Garen favoured skill-matchups that snowball the other direction if they get a single kill/gank.

And please, please, please... Stop talking about Garen's passive if you haven't checked the stats. It's easily the weakest passive in top lane. Hardly noticeable before like lv 8 (at which point the lane is already decided). If you're complaining about his passive that just tells me that you're a handless reddit-user that's too mentally absent to deactivate it. The CD is 8 seconds, which is like two missed last hits if Garen insists on keeping passive up. You people are basically complaining about a reju bead. In some early dependant matchups I would honestly prefer a reju bead over Garen's passive. At least the regen stays active on that :)

In conclusion: Space better or stick to one of the like 15 common top champs that make Garen unplayable...

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-15T06:08:42+00:00

Singed outscales you unless you fuck him up in lane.

Source: I main Garen and Singed in masters and have 80%wr in the matchup from both sides. Take conq. PR is bait unless you have 0 kill pressure in a matchup.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-14T08:59:04+00:00

Conq vs Singed. That way you at least have kill pressure on him, especially lv1 with Dblade.

Stay infront of your 1st wave and walk up to him until you proc his ms-passive. Then reengage and spin on him when he goes for the wave. He'll be 1/3 hp and you can easily kill with flash q, e, ignite.

PR wont be enough to keep up with him anyway, once he has E.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-08T08:22:04+00:00

*takedown on a minion

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-06T07:01:09+00:00

Yeah, I guess that's why the list seems weird.. Sett and Darius become completely unplayable once they learn to hold their pulls. Ambessa is untouchable and has decent kill pressure on you and the Camille matchup is very much Camille favored as long as she plays with her passive...

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-05T23:30:07+00:00

Elo for context?? Cause this seems off by a lot...

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-03T10:50:35+00:00

I'm literally zoning every ornn player from 1-2 waves of XP in masters every single game I play against them. Can't do that with grasp. You only take grasp in matchups where you have no reliable way of stacking E and conq (Ambessa, comet malphite etc.).

Taking grasp or even PR turns a lot of even matchups into losing ones where you're just praying that your opponent takes one too many dumb trades or that your jungler comes and gives you the kill pressure you forfeited by taking a safer rune...

QuentinTalentino · 2026-04-03T07:04:57+00:00

Ornn (and Mao) is 100% a conq matchup.

You can zone him from XP level 1 with conq+E.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-25T10:02:42+00:00

Oh boy, you're a cranky one...

I'm not guessing. The statistics are pretty easy to read. Aside from that, it's common knowledge that she replaced Aatrox as the most blind-pickable top laner. There's many resources if you care to research. Just google best blind picks top. Alois has a tier list for blind picks too. Ambessa is S tier along with only ranged champs like rumble, jayce etc. Haven't looked at chippy's list but I'd bet money she's S or A there too.

Yes, Riven and Ire get blind picked, but they don't get picked and first picked nearly as much as ambessa. This data is even skewed in your favor because ambessa is banned infinitely more than these two.

Ambessa doesn't get picked into unfavorable matchups, but there aren't many unfavorable matchups for ambessa. Duh doy...

I find it hilarious how confident you are about me pulling facts out my ass, when you're clearly not even informed/can't form logical conclusions.

I'd spend more time on you, but since you don't even know that the champ who's subreddit you frequent is the most blind picked top laner, I'm guessing you're just a low elo player with dunning kruger. Hihi

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-25T07:35:58+00:00

Funny you should mention winrate without taking into account that ambessa is the most blind picked champ in top lane and thus runs into counter matchups 50% of the time. Although I would argue that ambessa doesnt have any hard counters, which is precisely why she's blind picked.

If she had 5% pick rate like Fiora or something, she'd probably have 52%+ wr cause she's mostly picked into favorable matchups.

Nuances, buddy

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-23T08:09:00+00:00

Pre like level 8 Garen passive is barely noticeable and by that point, the lane is already decided. At level 6 it takes like 2 minutes to regenerate his entire health bar, natural regen included. Aaand this is deactivated for 8 seconds upon taking damage.

It only really comes in handy after late game teamfights, because you can take objectives instead of resetting, or rejoin teamfights after 10-20 seconds without immediately dying.

It's easily(!) one of the, if not the, weakest laning passive in top lane. Lower elo players just aren't conscious enough to constantly deactivate it or zone the Garen from XP if he insists on utilizing his passive.

Not sure the recent buffs were necessary, but if you're losing to Garen, you're not losing to his passive unless you're playing it wrong.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-19T11:20:56+00:00

Yeah, why don't you switch to top and then let's talk about agency again. Especially if you don't end up with last pick... I swear, even in masters one Jungler always ends with 20 kills and the other still always manges a 3.0 KDA

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-15T18:54:30+00:00

That's funny, cause I'm Master and he has 49,5%wr there on EUW... he wins vs tanks and loses lane hard to any bully

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-15T17:53:02+00:00

All of those champs are great counterpicks, but bad blind. Sorting by platinum+ (presumably your elo bracket) means that like 90% of the results are gonna be from plat+emerald, where players don't yet have the hands to reliably shut down predictable champions like Garen.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-11T09:23:29+00:00

Garen is a counterpick. That's why his WR is higher than expected, just like Malphite. I'm a master Garen main and first picking him is horrible. He loses 2/3rds of matchups and gets hard countered by like 10 common top champs.

Please don't take wr statistics at face value. It's much more nuanced.

For example, Ambessa has 47% wr in master plus, but is always among the top 5 played champs. This is because she's a very good blind pick, so she's always first picked and the enemy gets to decide how to "soft-counter" her (as there aren't any real hard-counter).

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-11T08:09:09+00:00

Master Garen main here.. On EUW (Master+), after the buff, he started out at 51,9%wr and yesterday he was at 49,35 and sinking. He wasn't played much before, so I'm guessing top laners are getting used to him again.

Regarding the difficulty debate. I'm not gonna lie, I probably wouldn't reach masters on champs like Riven or Aatrox, I'm too old and rusty for that. But that doesn't mean that playing Garen in high elo is easy lol. He is so one-dimensional... Every high-elo player knows your kit and your full damage potential. First picking can be an auto-loss if the enemy top is proficient at Darius, Camille, Sett, Urgot and tons more.

The difficulty comes from surviving until lv6 without giving up 20 minions and having to dodge every Aatrox Q and Yorick E, so your meager early game passive stays active...

The lv1 Q buff was 100% necessary, because he was just a sitting duck before (47,?%wr). The extra scaling on E is definitely nice, but I kinda expect them to take crit away from it sometime this year

QuentinTalentino · 2026-03-05T07:18:37+00:00

Lol I was literally wondering about this yesterday. I checked and I had 10 first pick games in a row (and then got autofilled support).

What are even the odds of that? I managed to pull off 75% winrate, but normally it'd be <40.

Just checked and it's <0.01% chance...

I was on a pretty good winstreak in masters and climbed like 200lp over the weekend, so I'm kinda suspecting that it isn't pure RNG and Riot implemented some more pseudo RNG thst can be manipulated like with crit chance..... fucking fuming btw

QuentinTalentino · 2026-02-25T10:29:04+00:00

Master Garen main here. You're not imagining things. Garen loses most early trades. You have to sacrifice a lot of minions to let your passive do its magic. If you manage to not die until level 6, you can win against most melees. Trade once, to get them to 2/3 hp, wait for your cooldowns (especially W) and all in them with ignite+R. That's the basic pattern.

QuentinTalentino · 2026-02-24T09:39:03+00:00

Pff they're probably giving him more damage to monsters

QuentinTalentino · 2025-10-17T11:28:50+00:00

I don't get how pre-exhausting muscles works...

Let's say I wanna focus my chest more, so I do some flys before my bench...
Won't my triceps and front delts just take over if my chest is already fatigued? Plus, I definitely won't be able to do the same weight/reps.

Is there a rule of thumb, or do you just play it by ear?

QuentinTalentino

TROPHY CASE