Garen is moderately popular but statistically underpowered, and we’d like it if he was as powerful as other straightforward top lane juggernauts. We’re continuing on the trend of making traditional fighter items more comparable to his crit builds and giving him better trading power before he has access to tools like Stridebreaker and Phantom Dancer.

Critical strike chance on Garen is pretty good since both his basic attacks and Judgment are improved by it. We want to continue to make space for non-crit Garen builds, so we're compensating the global critical strike damage increase and updating the calculation to properly discount bonus crit damage.

Garen is hitting a historical low breadth (the amount of unique players), and we'd like our signature accessible top lane fighter to be more enticing for more players. We're going to buff him up by showing some love to his E AD Ratio, which should further incentivize more fighter-y runes and items.

Garen is hitting a historical low breadth (the amount of unique players), and we'd like our signature accessible top lane fighter to be more enticing for more players. We're going to buff him up by showing some love to his E AD Ratio, which should further incentivize more fighter-y runes and items.

After the changes made to crit a few patches ago, Garen has been feeling a little less "DEMACIA!!!!" and a bit more "De... man see how little I can do.". So we're reverting his Arena-specific changes to help him fight back in the Noxian Arena.

Garen’s adjustments last patch were overall quite successful in opening up more fighter itemization but they left him a bit weaker than we anticipated so we’re here to buff him back up. Judgment’s damage will be increased from 100 total AD and above (which is reached very early on with typical builds) and we’re fixing a long-standing bug that would prevent Garen from shredding armor. His increased appetite for bonus AD should continue to push him toward enjoying items like Spear of Shojin and runes like Conqueror.

We're updating Garen to make his fighter pattern much more functional. The headlining features are a reduced cooldown on Judgment in order to allow him to play out sustained combat and an improved Courage active in order to better soak up damage. As compensation, he's losing a bit of burst damage through critical strike chance on E and overall damage on R. Our hope with these changes is to make fighter builds for Garen his best option and raise their power, as fighter Garen is currently underpowered.

Garen is crowding out a lot of other top laners and deals a shocking amount of mid-game damage with his crit builds, leading to a sort of tanky assassin play pattern. We'd like to reduce how much burst damage Garen is dealing by weakening his crit binding, which won't nerf his more balanced juggernaut builds.

Garen hasn't been living his best spin-to-win life recently, meaning he hasn’t been able to win early trades against other melee champions which is supposed to be one of his strong points. We’re buffing up his base damage and early durability to help him find his groove again.

Watch out for those crit Garen players, they know something that we don’t.

To adjust for changes to Garen’s most loved items this patch (Stridebreaker and Dead Man’s Plate), we’re bumping up his movement speed. We’re also adding extra oomph to his ult so that even if he can’t get to squishier targets, his ult will be more powerful against tankier frontlines.

With efficient stacking on his W without requiring much in return, Garen’s been able to have his beef and eat it too. We’re pushing down his spike in his tankiness so that his power curves more smoothly after picking up a Mythic item.