As someone who plays a lot of AI and PvP (mostly because I couldn’t pay my friends to take on human players) I can give a few notes from my experience.
- The first thing is to take autoattacks a lot more seriously. Sometimes I swear AIs need special documentation signed in triplicate before they’re allowed to autoattack. Main take away here is that you’re always just a little bit lower on health than you think you are, so don’t try to get too fancy.
- A rule I follow, if you are below 20% health then you don’t go in unless you are REALLY confident with the hero. Yes it hurts to idly stand by and watch a teammate die, but one of the easiest ways to throw a game is to try and save a teammate, fail, and now you’re down to 2v5 and you lose all the camps and a fort.
- Speaking of camps, they are quite important, but also note that AIs will relatively rarely invade and try to take your camps. Human players can be a bit more bold here. So stay sharp on the minimap when taking your camps. If 3 players from the enemy team blink out on your radar, consider calling for help in case they are trying to pull something aggressive.
- Minimap in general is a lot more important and useful against human players. AIs will rotate their entire 4 man from the bot lane to splitting between top lane and taking a mid camp without a single hero showing up on the minimap for even a frame. Most human players aren’t going to carefully and precisely path around the vision radius of your minions. Keep an eye on the minimap, and keep tabs on where you’re opponents are. I find it’s actually a lot easier than it looks.
- Lanes. The AI is very bad at laning, which is partly why if a vs. AI team manages their lanes correctly you can hit 10 around when the AIs reach 7. Don’t be like the AIs here. Make sure you dedicate to lanes until around ~16, at which point you should be a roaming 5 man because the cost of a teammate getting ganked at this point is far too high.
Those are my general tips for shifting into human matches from vs. AI. As for tanking in particular, really it’s just to remember your job is to peel, stun, or interrupt. Not yolo. Standing closer to an enemy hero than your teammate is often all it takes to protect your team vs. AI. That doesn’t really work against human players, who will either burst you down a lot faster than you expect, or will walk right past you to nail your dps and healer. Give the enemy a REASON to attack you, and make sure that reason isn’t “because I’m willingly running into machine gun fire”