Gain more Farm Than your opponent
Harassing while farming is an habit that needs to be developed once you have a decent ability in cs’ing.
As I said, it doesn’t really matter if you farm that well, as long as you are gaining more gold than your enemy laner.
You have 2 ways of dealing damages to your enemies, hence you have two ways of poking them.
1-By using skills
1-a-Direct Damage Skills (spammable)
1-b-AoE damage Skills
Assuming that you can properly CS with your auto.attacks, using skills should be reserved to poke your enemy.
Most of the time you’ll know whether you are in a winning or loosing matchup.
Generally loosing matchups are those in which a champion reaches a powerspike before the opponent, for example Caitlyn vs Vayne or Pantheon vs Ryze.
Being in a loosing matchup doesn’t necessarily equate to loosing the game, it literally requires that you change your “matchup-related-goal” toward one of just surviving instead of trying to dominate lane.
Your skills have a defined range and most of the time a crucial role in your matchup.
For example: Fizz’s E, can be used to avoid some poke, but against some champions, such as LeBlanc it requires that you save it to avoid her Ulti’s damage, not abiding to those matchup-specific rules will cause Fizz to be all-inned and die.
Once you have defined the matchup dynamic, you can use the rest of your spells as your mana allows you to.
Sometimes you want to trade for dominance, other times you might just want to be poke to get the mana out of your opponent.
As a general rule, you should be poking as much as you can, as long as it won’t cause you to have less than the mana you need to avoid loosing the matchup.
Remeber, if you are a mana based caster, the second you have no mana, you are useless.
Except for skills that are required to keep you alive, or to menace or prevent an all-in, aoe spells are best to allow poke as they make it so that you can both take last-hits while you are chuncking your opponent.
Three examples are: Renekton’s Q, Caitlyn’s Q and Ryze’s spell during his ultimate.
By using AoE spells, you are pushing the wave, creating an advantage since you’ll be able to use the wave as an effective shield and as additional damage.
If you hit your opponent while pushing, that’s even better.
Another advantage of pushing is that you’ll have your opponent under his turret.
Therefore his movements will be easily predictable hence you’ll be able to poke even more.
The biggest downside is that you’ll get ganked, but that’s part of the game, as I explained you can even turn a gank by hugging a large minion wave just before it goes into the enemy turret.
2-By using auto attacks.
2-a-Outplaying your opponent
2-b-Abusing your range
Using auto attacks is harder than poking with skills.
In order to be able to win in an auto-attack trading poke you need to be mechanically better than your opponent.
Here’s a few tips to do so:
first of all, auto attacks have cooldowns.
After an auto-attacks has been used, it will be on cooldown for an amount of time that is equal to 1/Attack speed.
For example, with an attack speed of 0.8, your champion will have to wait 1.25 seconds before being able to attack again.
Therefore if you attack your opponent just after he used an auto attack, you’ll be able to sneak some free poke.
The most common situation in which this happen is when your opponent is going for a last hit.
Make it a habit to sneak one auto attack just as your opponent is moving toward one of your creeps.
This comes with the condition that you don’t miss a creep yourself.
The easiest way to poke for free consists of having more range than your opponent, this include skills too.
If your opponent cannot reach you while you poke him, he’ll be forced to take the damage without being able to retaliate.
This for example is why Caitlyn is a reliably strong laner.
On the other hand, for balancing purposes, the higher a champion range, the lower it’s defenses or damage will be.
This means that generally speaking, a ranged champion will be harder to hit, but easier to kill when caught off-guard.
Other strategies to have an easier time dealing damage to your enemies are:
-pushing the enemy into his turret
-Using auto attacks when near your own minions
-poking and escaping
-all-inning the enemy
These strategies are more situational, sometimes, when you play a champion with no escapes, you should not be pushing even it would mean gaining a temporary advantage.
Pushing the enemy into his turret allows you to abuse the fact that you have more minions to make it so that your enemy should avoid any form of confrontation.
If he were to make an aggressive move, since you would have more minion backing you, he would findhimself taking a lot of damage for free.
Poking and escaping is a classic strategy that is highly matchup and cooldown dependent.
If you have a champion with an escape or with a stun, and possibly both (think of Renekton), you will find yourself being able to execute your whole combo, along with a few auto-attacks while using a stun and having an escape to minimize retaliation.
This optimal scenario has it’s drawbacks, in the case of Renekton he trade his high early damage with poor scaling.
All-inning is something that you should learn to do, this is highly based on how much you know the limits of your champions.
Generally speaking, you should all-in either when you have a sizeable advantage against your opponent or when you know your champion is stronger in extended fights.
Some matchups, such as Jax vs Kayle, can be defined by how willing is the Jax to be aggressive and NOT withstand the poke.
By going aggressive, since Jax is a melee champion, he will use his higher base stats against Kayle to even out the fight.