Five Enchantments I Feel Are Way Too Powerful

If you're one of the 1 people who read this, you may know I have quite a few problems with the enchanting system. It's outdated, it's luck-based, and I feel some enchantments are poorly balanced. Specifically, with the latter point, some enchantments are just WAY too powerful to the point they basically remove challenge from the game once obtained.

In this post I am going to talk about some enchantments I feel are way too powerful, and how I feel they should be rebalanced.

And first off, I am going to say once again: that villager exploit MUST be removed.

Right, with that out of the way... the first overly powerful enchantment that comes to mind, is of course...

Mending

The Mending enchantment basically means your gear will never break again. Your god-tier tools are here to stay forever. Before 1.9, when there was no mending, you would invest more sparingly in your gear with the knowledge it would break eventually. Even with Unbreaking III and anvil repairs, all tools must come to the end of their life eventually. Mending took this fine balance and threw it out the window. What's worse is that it can be very easily obtained through that stupid villager exploit, as well as fishing (rarely).

Mending is basically the ultimate enchantment. Your god tools will NEVER break - and neither will your Elytra. And here's the thing, I don't think Mending should be removed, or even nerfed. But I think it should be a LOT harder to obtain - for example - only found in the chests of advanced, late-game structures such as End Cities and Bastions. It could be found in other loot chests but very rarely. So that the average player will only ever get their hands on a couple of these books and need to choose very carefully what to enchant with Mending.

Infinity

This enchantment is an absolute travesty of balance. Sorry. The bow and arrow is perhaps one of the most useful tools in Minecraft. Almost anything can be taken down with this simple tool, up to and including the Ender Dragon. Very few mobs have some sort of inherent resistance to ranged attacks, and they can be used to take down even Ravagers with relative ease.

The trade-off is that you need to have a steady supply of arrows. You will need to farm chickens and get a decent amount of flint. Or kill lots of skeletons to get your arrows. That's fine, it's worth it for the ranged weapon attack. Part of the challenge is stocking up on arrows before an adventure, and making sure you have enough. I feel the difficulty of obtaining lots of arrows is perfect - they are obtainable enough you can accumulate a decent amount, but not so easily obtained you will be swimming in them early on.

Infinity takes all this balance and screws it up in to a ball. Imagine if in any FPS game, you could unlock an infinite magazine and could just shoot and shoot until the gun itself broke (but it had Unbreaking III so that took a while). Basically, this enchantment unlocks "not playing", as you only have to have a single arrow to basically not have to worry about ever running out of arrows until your bow breaks. It IS incompatible with Mending which is about the only good balancing act here. But this enchantment is also really easily obtained. It can be found through the enchanting table, and regularly through fishing and that blasted exploit.

This is an enchantment that I feel should either be removed outright, or like Mending, have it only be found very rarely.

Power V

The enchantment literally called "Power" is overpowered. Go figure. Sticking with the bow enchantments, this is the enchantment that simply adds to the damage done by a bow. But I feel it adds too much extra damage. Especially as this enchantment goes up to level V. The melee equivalent, Sharpness, I feel is a lot better balanced. Even Sharpness V only does 3 extra damage points per hit, putting a diamond sword from 7 to 10 damage points. But a bow, which already does up to 9 damage when fully drawn, will have 150% more damage added with Power V, meaning you can do up to 23 damage with a single arrow, 25 if it's a critical hit! This is enough to one-shot most of the basic night-time mobs from afar. 

I don't feel this enchantment is as ridiculously overpowered as the other 2, but it may need a bit of a nerf. Either remove the 5th level, or slightly reduce the amount of damage each level does.

PROTECTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the enchantment that actually inspired this rant. I was going to do an entire rant just about protection, and how it completely removes any challenge from the game, but then I remembered there are more enchantments I have problems with. 

Basically, when you have full diamond armor with protection IV, which really isn't THAT hard to get, especially with that 1.14 exploit (again!), all damage taken is reduced by more than 90%! That means a hit from even the game's toughest mobs, such as the Ravager and Piglin Brute, barely register. Even on Hard mode, a ravager's hit does half a heart or one heart. This is insane, the Ravager is one of the toughest mobs in Minecraft. As such, when you have full Prot IV, basically every mob in the game is reduced to a joke. You are essentially immortal. Especially if combined with potions and totems, there is literally no challenge to survival anymore.

But protection not only stops pretty much all damage even from the strongest of mobs, it also reduces fall damage and lava damage. With some very easily-obtained enchantments, you can become basically indestructible. In a survival game, this does not sit well. Protection IV basically removes all the survival and challenge of the game, as literally any mob or environmental hazard barring the void is no longer a threat, at all. I just don't think an enchantment that is so easily obtained should render you basically invincible.

I'd even go out on a limb and say the protection enchantment should be straight-up removed. Keep the blast protection, fire protection etc., but protection IV just takes so much of the challenge out that I actively avoid it when playing Survival as I feel it's cheating and no fun once I have it. This enchantment is WAY too overpowered to the point of being totally and utterly broken.

Honourable Mention: Fortune

Really, I'm only mentioning this one because of the villager exploit. The enchantment itself is fine, it's just far too easy to obtain. I'd even say this could be a treasure enchantment, but found fairly commonly in loot chests. I feel this enchantment is just a little too powerful to appear so commonly on an enchanting table.

Final Word

The enchantment system is SO overdue a big overhaul. I hope when/if they ever do get round to changing up the enchantment system, there will be some huge rebalances coming (as well as a way to make the system less random and more engaging for the player). There are a couple of other enchantments I feel could be touched up on, but these are the ones that come to mind as being definitely overpowered and too easily obtained.