Ice Barding ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Ice Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Cashmere Cloth ×1, Platinum Nugget ×1 and Diluted Vitriol ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 21 units, plus 11 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,152 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,103 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 7 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Wind Cluster, 2 Earth Cluster, 2 Lightning Cluster and 2 other kinds.

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

1 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Platinum Ore (4:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Cashmere Cloth has the widest use: 56 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.