Varnish

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Varnish is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Linseed Oil ×1 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 826 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 8 Water Shard.

Every step is Alchemist work, from a Lv 29 intermediate up to the Lv 41 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

2 of the 3 raw materials match a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 1 comes from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.

Varnish is itself consumed by 114 further recipes, spanning four of the eight crafting classes.