I've hovered in low Diamond for a couple seasons now, so my opinion may not be as valid as others. Support secondary for a while, as well.
Tear gives you the ability to spam your spells on cooldown for whatever reason you want. Combine this with Meditation in the Cunning tree, and you almost never run out of mana. In lower ELOs, nobody is able to dodge the barrage of skillshots. You're just able to chuck out skillshots until a few of them hit allowing you to go for a combo, which is a lot of damage. However, Tear is a very aggressive buy. It means you want to pressure. This is like a beacon to any competent jungler, and the lack of a sightstone spells certain death against these junglers.
Climbing can be done with any successful strategy applied well. For example, I reached D5 playing nothing but AD Alistar before his rework. It's not a matter of if it's good. It's a matter of how well you play it. For the record, it was not very good. It took an above average knowledge of the game and laning phase to use correctly. When it was used correctly, it wasn't better than any other carry top laner. This is just an example to show that you can climb doing anything. The real challenge is sticking around in that rating when you continue to do stupid shit.
