Heavy Metal Kite Shield ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Heavy Metal Kite Shield is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Heavy Metal Ingot ×2, Wolfram Square ×2, Gold Ingot ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 10 distinct raw materials totalling 33 units, plus 39 crystals.

That bill outweighs 10,907 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,153 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 33 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 15 Earth Cluster, 15 Fire Cluster, 7 Ice Cluster and 1 other kind.

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

5 of the 10 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Tungstite (2:00, 14:00), Ferberite (3:00) and 2 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Gold Ingot has the widest use: 184 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.