Overview

Mekanism Tools is an addon mod for Mekanism that adds in equipment made form the mod's materials, including Osmium and refined obsidian, as well as some extras like bronze, steel, and lapis. They also add tools called Paxels that act as all-in-one mining tools, and a relatively small chance for mobs to spawn holding this equipment, which they will drop with enough luck.

The Problem

These tools are severely overtuned, and are very obviously the only solution for anyone that decides to avoid Tinker's. The higher-end tools even eclipse Tinker's tools.
There is a terrible imbalance between a material's value and the power it bestows to a wielder. For anyone that knows about them, the choice is clear to skip Tinker's and make tools out of: wood > stone > osmium > refined obsidian > draconium.

I go quite in-depth here against Mekanism's tools, so I want to preface by saying I use these tools almost every time I play. I love them, I adore Mekanism, and the last thing I want is for it to be nerfed into irrelevancy. As they stand, however, the tools are too powerful.

Examples

Weapons

Osmium is a very common resource, found about - if not more - as often as iron. It would make sense that the sword deals as much damage as an iron one, but instead deals more damage than a diamond sword at 8 damage. It also possesses double the durability of iron, making it a trivial decision for anyone upgrading their tools.
In most mods, the Bronze sword deals 6 damage, as much damage as iron with a buff to durability as a reward for putting in the effort of alloying. The Mekanism bronze sword deals a comical 10 points of damage, as much as a sharpness 3 diamond sword. It also has by far the most durability of any bronze sword alternative at 800 durability; the second highest is the Embers Rekindled bronze sword with 510 durability.

Armour

Osmium armour offers 17 points of protection (compared to iron's 15 and diamond's 20), which is already a lucrative prospect considering its increased durability over iron and how common it is. However, each piece of osmium armour offers a point of armour toughness, which significantly increases survivability but making mortal blows that should probably kill a player in the iron age survivable. There are other oddities, for example Glowstone armour offering superior protection to Diamond but with no toughness, or Steel armour offering superior protection to other mod's steel armour despite using less steel and some iron in the recipe.

Also osmium leggings inexplicably protect more than osmium chestplates.

Tools

It's hard to measure mining speed numerically (since the Mekanism config uses an abstract "Efficiency" number - check how this is used in the mod code?), however there are still some notable oddities such as osmium mining significantly faster than iron, and osmium paxels being able to mine obsidian when osmium pickaxes cannot.

The main problem: Refined Obsidian

(Refined) Obsidian tools are completely overpowered, and easily the best in their league. Refined obsidian costs a little bit of power, some machines, one diamond for a tool set, and a few blocks of obsidian (which again, can be mined with an osmium paxel).

If anything changes in Mekanism Tools due to this ticket, let it be these.

The obsidian sword deals a monstrous 14 attack damage, which is more than a sharpness 5 diamond sword deals on crit. To put damage like this into perspective, consider a weapon of similar power: the Dreadium Katana. Neither weapon deals any extra effects and the Katana deals only one damage more. To acquire the katana, you must:

• Obtain statues by raiding Shoggoth lairs
• Obtain enough PE to enter the Abyssal Wasteland
• Survive there long enough to locate a hidden structure
• Defeat a boss
• Gather more PE to open a portal to the Dreadlands
• Survive there long enough to hunt minibosses
• Kill enough minibosses to gather enough Dreadium to create a Crystallizer
• Kill yet more minibosses to construct the Katana itself

All this for a weapon 7% better than one made with 1/4 of a diamond and some obsidian. For comparison, the much more nicely balanced Wyvern Sword also deals 15 damage, but with extra features that make a linear judgement difficult.

The armour is also extremely powerful, using 30 defence points and an incredible 4 points of toughness per piece for a total of 16 armour toughness. Toughness has an exponential effect on reducing high-damage hits, so when the vanilla maximum is 8 points total in Netherite (1.16, only 4 in 1.12), this is a huge dampening of otherwise dangerous hits.

I am again reluctant to compare numbers with mining speeds, but notably the obsidian pickaxe, when enchanted with Efficiency 5 (which is very easy, as will be discussed) is capable of instantly mining stone. This is impossible in Vanilla without the 40% mining speed increase from a haste 2 beacon, and is something Tinker's tools have been hard-coded to prevent.

An apt comparison is the Crystallised Obsidian tools from Cyclic and Mekanism's tools closest counterparts. The sword from here deals 10 damage, requires a diamond handle, and the obsidian itself is made with emerald and chorus flowers. These tools are much better balanced, locking quality materials behind a bossfight, and gating them alongside the highly enchanted diamond gear found in End Cities. They compete well.

Enchanting Obsidian

If your lethal weaponry, lightning fats tools, and impenetrable armour aren't good enough for the god you'll be fighting, they can be enchanted.

Some of the enchantment values for the Mekanism equipment strikes me as odd. For example, lapis is less enchantable than iron (8 < 14), let alone gold, and glowstone bizarrely competes with gold with an enchantability of 18. None of these are mechanically bad however.

Obsidian has an enchantability of 40, which aside from making me laugh out loud reading it for the first time, allows one to pull top-tier enchantments like Efficiency 5 and Sharpness 5 (with some Unbreaking 3 / Insight 3 thrown on for good luck) very consistently.

Proposed solutions

What I am about to suggest are not prescriptive solutions. Care should be taken when rebalancing tools and playtesting needs to occur, but I hope I've made a convincing case that something needs to happen.
Fortunately, like most of Mekanism, the tool stats are highly configurable.

My thought process here is to tone down the obsidian significantly, give it better non-energized alternatives that require more effort and dimensions to obtain. This should hopefully also legitimize more Tinker's materials too.
Lapis I decided to make similar to gold: highly enchantable (more so) at the expense of utility. This was done because gold tools have other applications outside of enchanting in the modded game, and there are legitimate (if niche) reasons to need highly enchanted tools you don't intend to use.
Osmium I decided to make inferior to iron in terms of useful numbers, with vast comparable durability. The player can choose between using more iron and better gear (in the earlygame where these tools are relevant, iron is scarce) or easily available osmium that will last a long time.
Glowstone I chose to make a useful alternative to diamond without the practical uses of obsidian mining or quite so much durability, as well as comparable enchanting weaknesses

For tools^{1 2}:

Equipment	Obsidian	Lapis	Osmium	Glowstone
Axe Attack Damage	11	9	8	9
Axe Attack Speed	0.8	0.8	1	1
Normal Attack Damage5	5	1	1.5	3
Durability	2200	64	500	750
Enchantability	15	28	14	8
Harvest Level3	4	1	2	2

For paxels, use the exact same stats and use the damage and attack values for the axe with a +50% increase to durability.

For armour¹:

Equipment	Obsidian	Lapis	Osmium	Glowstone	Steel
Base durability4	35	8	26	28	19
Enchantability	16	26	9	6	10
Toughness Per Piece	2	0	0	1	0
Protection: Chestplate	8	5	6	7	7
Protection: Boots	4	2	2	3	2
Protection: Helmet	4	2	2	3	2
Protection: Leggings	7	3	4	6	5

¹ Bronze and Steel have been removed because it is impossible to make tools out of either, or armour out of bronze. Another (more balanced) mod overrides.
² I'm reluctant to modify the "Efficiency" value of the tools without any understanding of how that number becomes practical speed. I suggest a round 10%-20% reduction in the number, and see how that fares.
³ 1 = can mine iron, 2 = diamond/redstone, 3 = obsidian, 4 = cobalt/ardite, 5 = ethaxium
⁴ Durability is calculated by multiplying this number by 11 : 13 : 15 : 16 for helmet : boots : legs : chest
⁵ Add 4 to this to get the sword's power.