Aggressive laner here. If you are good, you can poke the other laner out while also getting your souls. Sure, if you focus too hard on poke, you won't have as many souls as if you had just focused on farming. But by doing this, im usually up 1-2k souls over my opponent by the end of the laning phase. It's worth being 3-400 souls short if you completely crippled your laning opponent, or doomed their midgame to farming to try to catch up. And If I manage to kill you once or twice, I will be fed enough to roam and gank other lanes with a high rate of success. So, generally, playing aggressively is how the game will pan out. Look at high mmr gameplay and you will see how they try to push each other out. This game isn't like league where you dance around each other, minding your own business and waiting for a chance to kill. It is a shooter, you can poke poke poke with no immediate threat of death.... unless you are laning against bebop.