Wootz Shield ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Wootz Shield is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Wootz Ingot ×2, Hippogryph Leather ×1 and Wolfram Square ×1 — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 12 units, plus 18 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,221 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 580 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 14 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Earth Cluster, 4 Fire Cluster, 4 Ice Cluster and 1 other kind.

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

3 of the 9 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, Hippogryph Leather has the widest use: 131 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.