I really appreciate players like this honestly. Looking for help when you don’t understand is the best solution yet so many players don’t do it and instead take it out on others but let me get to your questions.
start reading here if you wanna skip my cry baby rant
So as you pointed you there’s 3 options to manage the wave
Freezing
Pushing
Allowing it to push in to you
There are sub types to these such as a slow push. This is where you’d have the minion wave closer to your tower while keeping the minions even on both sides. Since your incoming minions would reinforce your minions before the enemies it’ll slightly push more and more on each wave until you’ve built up 2-3 waves of cs to push to crash into the enemy tower.
But we’ll focus on the 3 main ones, when to do them, and why.
Freezing- freezing is a tactic used when you want to
A.open your opponent up to a gank from your jungler
B. Keep yourself safely farming without being concerned for ganks unless it’s a tower dive.
C. Zoning your opponent off the cs to deny them gold and exp (you’ll have to be stronger than your lane opponent to do this)
D. When you’re the weaker champion (in that stage of the game) but against a melee champion or a champion who isn’t very good at poking and harassing. This is where the ahri vs Zed matchup comes in. Due to ahri being mana dependent and weaker than zed in the early game because zed has all in potential on her if she’s shoved by freezing the wave just outside her turret she avoids giving zed any chance to harass or all in her without leaving himself vulnerable. Since zed’s main escape is his W if he chooses to harass ahri with it if he gets ganked while shoved up that far he’ll have to burn flash and he still would most likely die. On top of that he can’t all in ahri because he’ll draw tower aggro and ahri is free to harass him every time he walks up for cs with no consequences to the ahri player as opposed to if ahri was shoving she’d be risking being ganked or zed all in’ing her.
You can freeze a wave by holding 4 caster minions outside turret range tanking them. Once the waves crash at the spot you froze the 4 casters your wave will always die first leaving again 4 casters and you can rinse and repeat as long as you can tank them safely. To break an enemy freeze you need to shove in the wave and force your opponent back so he can’t tank the minions this is usually done with jungle help so you don’t end up getting ganked and killed while playing aggressively.
Pushing-pushing is a tactic used to apply pressure on the map.
The times to push
A. When you want to roam
B. When you want to pull the enemy team to one side of the map to take an objective on the other side (split pushing is an example of this)
C. When you want to deny exp and gold from your lane opponent who you just killed, forced to back, or is currently roaming.
D. If you want to back but this one is circumstantial because sometimes you don’t have the health or mana to push it fast enough depending on the situation
Most of these are self explanatory so I’ll just jump into how to push. Of course one way is to spam abilities to hard push as a mid laner but what majority of players don’t know is you don’t need to do that to push. Just auto attacking the back line minions and killing them will cause your wave to push because the back line deals more dmg which means by killing them your minions won’t die as fast so you’ll have more minions dealing dmg to their melee minions and you can still last hit them without losing anything.
If you should push for level 2: depends on the matchup. Take for example I’m playing ahri into talon I know at level 2 talon wins and is very strong so I’d last hit and harass him with abilities to discourage him from attacking me but I wouldn’t push the wave instead I’d let him push it to me. I wouldn’t auto attack the talon because if you do you’re going to draw minion aggro which will then have the wave push into him since his minions arent attacking your wave anymore. In the case of ahri vs ryze I would push because it’s really hard for mages to farm under tower and it’s better to have them spamming their mana on the wave to get it rather than allowing them to farm with autos while harassing me with abilities. Be mindful of the level 2 and 3 jungle ganks tho.
Lastly allowing it to push into you.
A. You don’t wanna be ganked
B. You’re too weak to fight or contest your laner
C. You’re sitting on too much gold or are low on resources (health or mana)
D. If you wanna set up a gank but normally freezing is better for this option because you’re opponent would have to press up to get farm.
Most of the time you want to stay in range of exp but if you’re being zoned it’s best to stay out of vision of your opponent because they’ll either assume you backed or you’re roaming in which case they’ll shove and then you can safely farm under tower.
If you have any questions or I missed something feel free to ask or add to this.
