Plumes of the Vortex ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Plumes of the Vortex is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Wolfram Ingot ×3 and Electrum Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 27 units, plus 26 crystals.

That bill outweighs 9,763 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,605 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 14 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Wind Crystal, 6 Fire Cluster, 5 Wind Shard and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Goldsmith 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 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, Electrum Ingot has the widest use: 234 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.