Ink & Quill

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Ink & Quill is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Enchanted Iron Ink ×3 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 10 units, plus 5 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,754 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,122 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 3 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 4 Water Shard and 1 Lightning Shard.

Every step is Alchemist work, from a Lv 14 intermediate up to the Lv 15 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.

Ink & Quill is itself consumed by 6 further recipes, spanning two of the eight crafting classes.