Titanium Kite Shield

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Titanium Kite Shield is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Titanium Nugget ×5, Darksteel Nugget ×2 and Titanium Rivets ×2 — which resolve to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 41 units, plus 42 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,923 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,267 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 8 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 34 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 34 Fire Crystal, 4 Earth Crystal and 4 Ice Crystal.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Armorer to Lv 55 and Blacksmith to Lv 54 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 4 raw materials are gathered, and one of them is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Darksteel Nugget has the widest use: 121 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.