Talons of the Vortex ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Talons of the Vortex is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Wolfram Ingot ×3 and Uraeus Leather ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 25 units, plus 22 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,313 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,056 of the 1,932 Blacksmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 10 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Wind Crystal, 6 Fire Cluster, 3 Earth Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Leatherworker to Lv 43 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

3 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Ferberite (3:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Wolfram Ingot has the widest use: 107 recipes call for it, spanning five of the eight crafting classes.