Reinforced Darksteel Wire ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Reinforced Darksteel Wire is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Darksteel Wire ×1 and Darksteel Nugget ×2 — which resolve to 2 distinct raw materials totalling 8 units, plus 50 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,254 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 514 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 23 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 27 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 23 Ice Shard, 21 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.

1 of the 2 raw materials come out of the ground, 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.