Fighter's Armor Augmentation ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Fighter's Armor Augmentation is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Darksteel Ingot ×2, Terminus Putty ×1, Wolfram Ingot ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 40 units, plus 35 crystals.

That bill outweighs 11,825 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,466 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 23 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 7 Water Crystal, 5 Lightning Crystal and 5 other kinds.

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

3 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00) and Ferberite (3:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 22 Eorzean hours, about 64 real-world minutes.

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