By the way, combining the three...not the best of ideas for obtaining a good rank. Between unfamiliarity with what the best comps would be in the latest meta (needing to relearn everything...or as it turns out, not very much to be honest) and going out of my way to make comps that weren't the most ideal but would fulfill the requirements, I ended up initially placed in Iron II.
Yes, Iron.
I've since advanced to Bronze IV, but my LP is so ridiculously/dangerously low that I could be demoted back into iron in any case of having bad random rolls.
And make no mistake, the game still is random. Riot games improved it. You almost always get at least one drop from a wave...but it's "almost", not "always". Furthermore, said drop? Can be gold...which is utterly worthless...especially when instead of an item which could be more valuable than twenty gold, you end up with a consolation prize of...one. gold. piece.
Basically you still need to get lucky on what items you get.
This also applies to the carousel. You need to, if near/at the bottom, be lucky with what's on it; you need to, if near/at the top, hope that the people below leave you something you want and/or that there was nothing on the carousel that was gamebreaking.
Items, or a lack thereof, still drive a significant part of the game.
And then there's the rolls. You can't get by with any combination of mostly-T1-synergies; you can't get by past the earlygame with non-synergistic T2s. To do well in a match, you need T2s that happen to have good synergies...which...requires luck.
There's some skill involved, sure, but right now a single bad game can knock you down for circumstances out of your control, which kinda sucks.
Oh well.
I'm most of the way to the final Beta reward (well, final that I know of, anyway); if I completed the current quests I have, I'd have it! But since that'd require at least ten games...it'll have to wait.
I'm going to bed now instead.