What Causes Elo Hell?
When I started playing ranked about a month or so ago, I completed my placements with a record of 2-8 (I believe). I got placed in Silver V. Since then, as you can very clearly see from my profile, I've obviously improved somewhat. I haven't made leaps and bounds, but I have gotten noticeably better. At one point I was up to a 57% winrate or higher in ranked, now I'm slowly slipping. Since hitting Gold V, I've entered promos to go to Gold IV 4 times now and lost them all 4 times. If you look at my match history, almost ALL of my losses in the last week have been promos losses. I won the first match the first time, then lost the next two; the other three have been a free win and then two losses. Every. Single. Time. I can go into promos, lose 'em, win all the way back into promos, then lose it again.
I assume this is what people mean by elo hell. I play meta junglers, I'm decently good with a couple (Nunu and Warwick) which I have kind of high winrates with over the course of my ranked matches this season. But when it comes to my promos, it's like I get different teammates than what I normally play with. I realize there's randomness with whom you get stuck with, but these guys feel like actual bronze in my gold promos, and then outside of promos they feel like they're actually on my skill level.
What I want to know is what changes with promos matchmaking? I realize I can't win 100% of the time, I realize I'm not good enough to win all of the time. What is bothering me is why I LITERALLY can't win a promos game but can and do win most all of the other matches recently. In this last promos series, the last match I had a Morgana that went first item Zz'rot. I mean how do you compensate for that? You could argue I psyche myself out during promos, but I actually seem to try harder during promos. I try to communicate more, I try to help develop a gameplan more, and the teams will agree to the plan and then chase the enemy team into unwarded jungle after we just traded kills 1 or 0 for 2, and then throw 3 or 4 kills to them. You could argue I'm not good enough to get any higher than Gold V, but then why do I win so many matches that aren't my promos series and why is my winrate still so high? You could argue that I get carried literally every other match except promos, but is that really more likely than something being fundamentally different about my promos matches? I really don't know.
tl;dr I keep losing promos in the same way every time, what changes during promos matches?