Tidal Barding ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Tidal Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Darksteel Plate ×1, Gold Ingot ×1, Hippogryph Leather ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 12 units, plus 18 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,221 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 580 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 15 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Crystal, 3 Earth Crystal, 3 Ice Crystal and 4 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 50, Blacksmith to Lv 50, Goldsmith to Lv 50 and Leatherworker to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

4 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00), Gold Ore (9:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 16 Eorzean hours, about 47 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Gold Ingot has the widest use: 184 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.