Balance can change over time. Like before you could sprint, there were mods that let you run fast, such as quantum suit leggings in IC2. You could look at it two ways; either they were cheating and letting you go a speed you shouldn't have been, letting you evade enemies and everything too easily, or they were great for finally letting you travel farther distances in a reasonable amount of time. Yet these days you can sprint, and even use potions to go faster, so a mod item doing it seems like less of a big deal.
It's similar with enchanting. Before that existed, mods that added powerful tools and weapons might have seemed like overkill. Something that implemented a silk-touch-like ability might have seemed unfair since those items weren't normally available in the game. Similarities to fortune and luck might have seemed like outright cheating for getting free resources. Yet these days it's commonplace for items and tools to have all sorts of buffs and features, since the vanilla game can do it too.
Even stacking food was an issue once upon a time. IC2 let you can it in the canning machine and carry around stacks, while others simply let vanilla food stack outright. Some people might have thought that was unfair, that just popping down cans to keep your life up was close to invincibility since eating was insta-heal back then. On the other hand, it let you adventure longer and mine more since it wasn't cluttering up your inventory space. Yet once beta 1.8 came around, the entire food canning mechanic of IC2 was almost useless, other than maybe for making monster meat usable.
It's not just vanilla changes though. Mod interoperability also often affected balance. Macerating bones and blaze rods completely threw off some of EE2's balance, for example. EE2 is probably not the best example, although EE1 was arguably far more balanced and less affected by other mods. Yet before EE2 came out, EE1 would have been seen as overpowered, since it still created free resources and added powerful weapons/tools. Buildcraft also contributed to that by letting you automate some of the resource creation.
So while it's just stating the obvious and reiterating a lot of what's said, balance will always be relative to the Minecraft version, the mods installed, the particular point in time that you're playing them, and of course the player's idea of balance. All you can do is find a pack that caters more to your liking, or go all Burger King and "have it your way" with a custom pack.
It's similar with enchanting. Before that existed, mods that added powerful tools and weapons might have seemed like overkill. Something that implemented a silk-touch-like ability might have seemed unfair since those items weren't normally available in the game. Similarities to fortune and luck might have seemed like outright cheating for getting free resources. Yet these days it's commonplace for items and tools to have all sorts of buffs and features, since the vanilla game can do it too.
Even stacking food was an issue once upon a time. IC2 let you can it in the canning machine and carry around stacks, while others simply let vanilla food stack outright. Some people might have thought that was unfair, that just popping down cans to keep your life up was close to invincibility since eating was insta-heal back then. On the other hand, it let you adventure longer and mine more since it wasn't cluttering up your inventory space. Yet once beta 1.8 came around, the entire food canning mechanic of IC2 was almost useless, other than maybe for making monster meat usable.
It's not just vanilla changes though. Mod interoperability also often affected balance. Macerating bones and blaze rods completely threw off some of EE2's balance, for example. EE2 is probably not the best example, although EE1 was arguably far more balanced and less affected by other mods. Yet before EE2 came out, EE1 would have been seen as overpowered, since it still created free resources and added powerful weapons/tools. Buildcraft also contributed to that by letting you automate some of the resource creation.
So while it's just stating the obvious and reiterating a lot of what's said, balance will always be relative to the Minecraft version, the mods installed, the particular point in time that you're playing them, and of course the player's idea of balance. All you can do is find a pack that caters more to your liking, or go all Burger King and "have it your way" with a custom pack.
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