The TS808 Ibanez tube screamer is nice for distortion...

mesa V-twin has alot of gain but needs to be cranked to get it sounding good. Boss metal zone the old tube screamer is cool too

In nearly 20 years of playing, I have never broken a pick. It seems like the string would break before the pick does. My advice: Stop wasting so much energy playing so hard. A lot of technique is efficiency. Stop using your arm so much and use your wrist more. It will suck at first but you will get used to it.

Try an Ibanez TK999HT. It's a tube pedal. I own one and I get great tones, sounds and everything else out of it. As far as picks, all I play is Jim Dunlops. They're the ones with the turtle on them. They hardly ever break, and you have to actually work to break them.

check out the black dunlop 1 mm picks. they can take alot of abuse. stop wating your time with first act picks. like most of their gear, they are junk....

as far as distortion goes...what kind of amp are you playing thru????????

I once broke the tip of an Ibanez 0.8 triangle pick... But, Dunlop nylon picks or Pickboy nylon picks are all solid choices. Or... you can go crazy and buy a steel pick... It will not only outlive your strings, it will probably outlive your guitar and even yourself too and it's not thick and bulky like the 2mm or 3mm picks.

cant help you with pedals... but i can recommend tortex pics, as the ones i use.
find 'em right here below in my gear recom.

just get some .7 dunlop picks, they should be yellow. those wont really break on you, they will grind down after a while though but you can always refile them a few times and then just buy new ones.

I think the only time that I ever broke a pick was when I was playing bass, and used the big triangular bastards, but since guitar, I haven't broken any, you must just hammer it dude!
I use the dunlop 1mm black picks with the grips on them, I find any picks without those grips on them, I'm totally screwed.
As far as pedals are concerned, I would suggest maybe just getting a high gain amplifier. I have a Mesa Triple Rectifier head that I play through a Marshall 4x12, and it has a seriously disgusting amount of gain available, but if you don't want to invest that much money (as my whole setup came to around 3500$ cdn) they sell Mesa Dual Rectifier Roadster Combo amps, and they're pretty good, that's what I use in the guitar stores when I try out new guitars, as its close to my sound.

http://www.mesaboogie.com/Product_Info/Rectifier_Series/roadster/roadster.html

Thats what i would suggest, as playing around with pedals is tiresome, in my opinion. But as far as pedals are concerned, I hear good things about the Ibanez tube screamers.

There's a common theme here. Get Dunlop pics! You can identify their thickness by their colors. I use the purple ones. I like my pics thick. The Dunlop Tortex pics are nice too!

I have the Digitech Grunge pedal, which is very good. As for the picks you should probably try and get used to play with thicker picks becouse after a while you will get used to it.