Pain of the Vortex ★★★

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

That bill outweighs 9,543 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,087 of the 1,932 Blacksmith 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 Fire Shard and 1 other kind.

Every step is Blacksmith work, from a Lv 42 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

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, Cobalt Ingot has the widest use: 145 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.