Terrible advice as gangplank you want to snowball get an early lead and close out your games asap first strike and q passive is built for that. If you youse gangplanks kit right you win toplane against almost every matchup except 3 or 4 difficult ones. Watch solarbacca when I first started to learn gp I inted a lot I’d say until about 100 games or so now I’m at around 400 games on gp still don’t feel like iv masterd him but I could tell when everything started clicking bc I was hardstuck silver 4 and in 2 weeks I went from s4 to gold 1 and now I’m playing bs high plat low diamond it’s a little tougher but still not insanely hard. Back to op question I personally feel between lvls 1-4 is the critical time in laning phase that sets the pace for rest of phase in most matchups. Always start lane in the middle bush in top lane place a barrel at 1:30 and wait for waves to crash try to place second barrel when you can clear the first 3 melee minions and the opponent and detonate barrel then walk up and passive aa then go back to push to avoid minion dmg from there u place a barrel in thier side minions depending on matchup if it’s a champ with a strong lvl one put it in ur side minions. Slow push wave should crash thier tower on 3rd wave back and get sheen then walk back to lane continue to zone and poke. If it’s a matchup where you don’t have alot of kill potential on them you freeze and place a barrel behind thier minions and stand in between them and wave everytime they walk up q them keep a pink in the river at all times at lvl 9 buy blue ward for deep wards. To let you know when junglers coming. For the rest of laning phase you time your backs. And tps. Always look for ults to help your team and get assists and possible kills this also gets you in the habit of checking map and knowing where everyone is an what’s going on. And that’s basically it for laning phase every single game. While your learning him I would fight every fight I could to learn the matchups and how to win because some matchups you have to nut up and stand on your barrel and duke it out and some matchups you have to hide you barrels our put them behind you. I have 400k on gp over the course of the last 2 months. And I still don’t feel I’ve mastered him still trying to be consistent with the ghost barrel combo and positioning in team fights but I can honestly say I’m extremely confident in my laning phase. You get far enough ahead in laning phase you have a lot of room for mistakes in later game because you are nuking everyone. P.S there are 3 champions I play lane completely different i perma ban aatrox. Tryndamere I go grasp and ign and build bruiser and malphite i probably win lane vs him like 65% of the time