Garen Guide: 5 Things You Learn from Maining Garen
By Josh Tyler
Our Garen guide will teach you tricks to improve your League of Legends gameplay!
2. Auto Attack Resets
Garen doesn’t have a ton of complexity in his kit, but one thing that is great about him is that he has tools to let players learn some basic mechanics. Garen’s Q, Decisive Strike, is an auto attack reset, and is a great tool for new players to learn and practice this skill.
For new players, every champion has an auto attack animation that consists of three parts: the wind-up, the attack, and the follow-through. Atto attack canceling allows you to immediately attack after the attack animation (and damage) is finished, eliminating the follow-through animation. This allows you to get off your second attack quicker and deal your damage faster.
To do this one Garen, wait until your basic attack lands on a minion or enemy champion. Once you see the basic attack is done, immediately press Q. You’ll see that instead of following through on the previous attack, Garen will go straight into the wind-up on his next attack. This is a key tool for players to learn because it lets you deal more damage in a short period of time, helping you win trades or last-hit minions.
3. Learn to All-In
“All-in” is a term in League of Legends that means to go “in” and attack the enemy champion with the intention of killing him. When you all-in, you plan to use all of your abilities, including any Summoners Spells that are up, to get the kill on your enemy. This is risky because if you fail you will have used everything in your arsenal and have no way to respond if your enemy turns to deal damage and all-in you.
Garen is one of the champions whose kit is very clearly built for all-ins. He has a speed boost and silence on his Decisive Strike, which lets you run fast towards your enemy and prevent them from escaping, as well as an execute on his ultimate, Demacian Justice (an execute means that the damage is calculated based on the target’s missing health, or it does more damage on low-health enemies).
When playing Garen, you are going to learn to judge when you can and cannot all-in as well as when you have to all-in. For instance, in some of those pesky matchups against ranged champions, your only real option is to go for the all-in before the enemy pokes you (hitting you with auto attacks and ranged spells, depleting your health pool). If you play enough Garen, you’ll learn to judge how much damage you do with all your spells, learning when to go for those all-in plays.