Darksteel Wire ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Darksteel Wire is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Darksteel Nugget ×2 — which resolves to 1 distinct raw material totalling 6 units, plus 27 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 466 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 21 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 6 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 11 Ice Shard, 10 Earth Shard and 6 Fire Crystal.

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

The single raw material is gathered, and it is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Darksteel Wire is itself consumed by 1 further recipe, all of them Armorer recipes.