Wild Rift Garen build guide: Best runes, spells, items, tips and tricks, more

Wild Rift is now available in many parts of the world and millions of players are now getting some serious time with the mobile version of League of Legends.

While there are many similarities between the PC and the mobile version, there are also clear differences, from the available champions to how Runes work, and of course how you control your character. These difference, and more unnamed, give Wild Rift a unique meta wholly separate to its older brother.

Continuing with our champion guides, we will focus on one of the flagship characters of the franchise, Garen: The Might of Demacia, who thanks to his easy-to-use abilities and great resistance, make him a serious champion deserving of respect.

Garen: His active and passive skills

(Picture: Riot Games)

His passive ability, Perseverance, allows Garen, when not engaged, to regain a percentage of health every second.

Let's move on to his active skills:

• Decisive Strike: Grants movement speed, as well as freeing Garen from all slows and triggers a charged attack, dealing bonus damage and silencing the enemy on impact.
• Courage: Reduces damage taken for a brief moment and grants additional resistance against crowd control.
• Judgment: Garen will spin his sword for several seconds, dealing damage to all enemies hit by it. Enemies hit with the edge of the sword will take critical damage.
• Ultimate - Demacian Justice: Garen will leap into the air with his sword towards an opponent. On impact, the attack will do a great deal of damage to both the target and everyone around the area of impact.

Recommended Runes and Spells for Garen

When deciding what runes to use for Garen you must consider how you intend to use him. One build will benefit his attack, the other making him more tank-like with scalable health bonuses.

Keystone Runes

• Conqueror: Grants bonus damage through stacks, easily achieved thanks to his Judgment ability.
• Grasp of the Undying: Deals bonus damage based on Garen's maximum health for every 4 seconds in combat. It can be carried hand in hand with a composition of objects for Tanks.

Minor Runes

• Brutal: Increases his armour penetration, giving him an additional advantage against any champion in his lane.
• Spirit Walker: Grants bonus health and slow resistance, combines well with his Decisive Strike ability.
• Pack Hunter: Increases movement speed when close to allies. Additionally, it grants you and your allies bonus gold when participating in kills with your team.

Additionally, you can replace Spirit Walker with Hunter - Titan, which grants additional health and tenacity for each unique takedown, something that is benefited by Courage.

(Picture: Riot Games)

His spells of choice are both known and infamous, as both memes and strategies have been created to counter them:

• Flash: Garen's play style allows him to overextend without much care, with Flash giving him an escape mechanism that few champions can counter.
• Ignition: The main cause of ragequitting of many players, it helps you secure kills whether you use your Ultimate or not.

The best items for Garen

(Picture: TapLet'sPlay)

Garen focus is on physical attacks and health regeneration, in addition to having impressive armour and magic resistance scaling. These items help accentuate these inherent traits:

• Trinity Force: Its passives increase his physical damage substantially, in addition to granting him bonus movement speed.
• Dark Blade: Grants bonus health and damage, as well as drastically reducing enemy armour with each attack or skill damage. It has great synergy with Judgment.
• Dance of Death: Converts explosive damage received into delayed damage, allowing you to fight the enemy for longer.
• Guardian Angel: Grants you a second chance thanks to its passive, allowing you to play aggressively when available.

To complement this, you can complete his item composition with three variants:

• Physical Defense: Ninja Tabi with Teleport Enchant, with Dead Man's Plate or Sunfire Cape.
• Magic Defense: Mercury Threads with Teleport Enchant, and Spirit Visage.
• Total Offensive: Boots of Swiftness ​​with Teleport Enchant, with Youmuu's Ghostblade or Sterak's Gage.

Tips for Garen’s play style

(Picture: Riot Games)

Having no abilities with any mana or energy costs allows Garen to be a very aggressive champion from start to finish, letting him execute key enemies while holding the front line.

Also, thanks to his plentiful armour and magic resistance from his abilities, combined with your chosen rune and item composition, it’s easy to use Garen to defend lanes on his lonesome.

• Read more: Wild Rift tier list - The best Champions by role and class

In terms of his abilities, Decisive Strike allows you to move and enter fully into combat with the enemy, as well as giving you some security in case of ambushes, allowing you to silence any opponent who comes towards you, and along with the improved movement speed, you can easily escape from potentially risky situations.

(Picture: Riot Games)

Courage will give you a growing advantage during the early and middle game, thanks to the percentage of armour and magic resistance that its passive provides, therefore it’s vital that you manage to eliminate as many minions as possible with the help of Judgment, to maximise the advantage of this ability.

Due to Garen's strengths, he is a high priority target for the opposing team and will be the focus in team fights, knowing this you must have both Judgment prepared to do the greatest possible damage to them, such as Demacian Justice, which you should use when an enemy is low on health, or you want to eliminate the enemy carry.

• Read more: Wild Rift Darius build guide: Best runes, spells, items, tips and tricks, more

Garen is a champion with very efficient skills for individual matchups, as well as being one of the simplest and easiest champions to learn to use, so if you want to have a safe first approach to the top lane or want to learn the basics of defending a lane, Garen is your best option.