Replica High Allagan Kite Shield ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Replica High Allagan Kite Shield is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Wootz Ingot ×2 and Platinum Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 17 units, plus 17 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,161 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 660 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 5 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 12 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Earth Cluster, 6 Fire Cluster, 3 Ice Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 60, Blacksmith to Lv 50 and Goldsmith to Lv 50 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

1 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Platinum Ore (4:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Platinum Ingot has the widest use: 176 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.