I imagine the original intention was a easter egg for people that had to journey out to bumfuck nowhere for epic npcs or faydedar and didnt anticipate players binding there at the time.

Edit: neriak pots I think were stated as an idea for evil races to easily get to faydedar and completely unrelated.

Even more than that, EQ was made during the 1990's "world simulator" era, not the newer "theme park" video game era. Norrath's supposed to be a high fantasy world where if you go far enough out into the wild areas of the world you'll find strange and wondrous things. There are deliberate enigmas. EQ was severely limited by its era's technology and was unable to fully realize the ideal, but the firepots represent one such remote point of interest. The notion that everything in the game has to have a clear purpose is a paint-by-numbers theme-park notion at odds with the world simulator concept.

Danth

i took a memorable pilgrimage during live as a lowbie wizard to see this “magical” room deep in the ocean

awed at the first quad kiting wizard I ever saw @ raptors, thus cementing my fond adoration of TD as a neat place

Yeah I mean it is clear that the binding classes that weren't born with teleports were not intended to have teleportation abilities, which the firepots grant them.

Tough call for staff here.

Same with other stuff like whatever that bind affinity item is that mellees can use that drops for a while in kunark.

Classic thing to do would be to leave all nerfs in tact, IE next progression server would simply not have manastone, insta click pumice, bind in firepots, bind clicky, ETC.

Our staff went with a custom approach to try to give some classic legacy stuff that they don't think breaks the game too much.

At least they kept in the four days. I spent the whole weekend trying to get an Iksar to level 12 and I barely squeaked in on time. My first time getting a bind at Tim's Deep. On live my main character was a bard and I had a level 12 magician but I found out about the bind spot on day 5 or 6. There was not a lot of sharing from the people in Beta.

I believe the staff's stance is that the most classic approach is to replicate the classic timeline as faithfully as possible, including pre-nerf items and their nerfs. However, the playerbase's response to that creates the unclassic situation of legacy item proliferation... A tough choice indeed.

the untimely bind nerf is one of the decisions i actually agree with
in the spirit of classicness

You could bind at firepots recently, but someone dropped a large group of reavers on 'em and broke 'em

rip firepots

Oh yeah, original EQ devs were indeed naive. It was one of the first MMOs. Game designers weren't familiar with the way the player population would swarm over the world and find every possible way to exploit everything. I really think they didn't predict people would start to bind themselves at the Firepots - and only when players started to do so did the devs think ahead and realize eventually everyone would.

never underestimate the power of stay at homes with a supply of hot pockets