About to drop into Iron 4. Genuinely don't know what I'm doing wrong
I started playing League last summer and I've both generally had fun and gotten pretty addicted to it. I started playing ranked basically the minute I hit lv 30. Last split/season I tanked my MMR and rank through a rookie mistake of taking champs I've played all of 2-4 times into ranked. Ofc I ranked way, way down from a new account placement in low gold/high silver.
But since then it's been a continuous downward spiral. This season I cleaned up my champion pool a bit, focusing on mainly playing Jax/Zac/Briar. I'll have a good game or two, sometimes even S ranking (relative to other Irons lmao) but the trend has been consistently downward to the point that I'm Iron 3 0LP.
I've watched replays, I've tried to learn itemization, I recognize that *I* am doing something critically wrong but I can't really understand what. I could, admittedly, try to be even more disciplined about champ pool (I seem to enjoy the variety for sure but also have a bad habit of going on losses and then instinctively/automatically going "I'll try X instead maybe it's more my playstyle". But fwiw I have tried to keep that limited to normals.)
I'm genuinely confused. I have such a feast or famine outcome per game. Sometimes I'm the hard carry, other times I get absolutely crushed. There's no in between, it feels like, and subjectively I'm doing nothing appreciably different in regards to how I'm approaching a given game. I tend to try to focus on farm/GPM and sometimes it leaves me two levels ahead of the enemy jungler and other times I'm 2 levels down on the same.
I've also read similar threads here. I freely and readily admit I am the consistent factor in my games and thus I'm not blaming teammates/bots etc. In my experience it cuts both ways; We might get some inter or bot and almost inevitably lose but it happens in my favor as well. That's not what's doing it. It's me.
That said I am, as I said, mystified. Iron's seen as a kind of joke within the league community, a rank you can trivially climb out of with even basic game concepts and awful mechanics but that's not been my experience at all. Over 100 levels in and I'm *extremely* bad to the point of being in the bottom percentile. What gives? What do I need to do?
https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/SensitiveThug-42069