I've done some looking into this, just doing date specific searches and using the way back machine and here's what I pulled up if any of it can be helpful. Sorry if this is all a mess.
First, establishing our era to pull relevant info from:
Epics released September 19, 2000
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/hist...es-2000-2.html
"The first Druid epic (1.0) was obtained on the Mithanial Marr server by Sobe Silvertree of the guild Afterlife."
Wednesday November 15, 2000 (just weeks before velious came out)
http://www.afterlifeguild.org/templa...ndex_jun_dec00
March 14, 2001 3:00 am
"As part of the Plane updates, we've made several adjustments to Epic
quests for a number of classes."
So basically, there's a window of September 19th 2000 to March 14th 2001 to search for any mention of the pod of seawater or how often fay dropped it. (would they have changed the regular fay after adding the triggered one?)
Now here's a somewhat messy jumble of EVERY single link I could find in that window referencing Faydedar/pod of seawater
http://web.archive.org/web/200104211....shtml?id=4470
- beastiary reference on fay, mentions pod dropping during gm event, etc
http://www.100megsfree.com/ktcrhp/hints/druid.html
http://www.legacyofsteel.net/Archives/Post/2000-11-20
http://thedruidpages.tripod.com/Ques...epic_quest.htm
- era relevant epic guides and a post from a guild page
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...-C-7RwA8gyGc3g
- some essay or whatever. skip to page 9 "the epic quest" for fay. kinda boring.
Basically, these links all mention the pod dropping 100% or otherwise suggest that a druid would
just have to get a raid for fay and that was that, no multiple attempts. The only difficulty was getting fay before it got killed by the iksar master an hour or 90min or so after it popped (taken from later but less relevant links).