Heavy Metal Cuirass of Fending ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Heavy Metal Cuirass of Fending is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Grade 3 Vitality Dissolvent ×3, Heavy Metal Ingot ×2, Wolfram Square ×2 and 5 others — which resolve to 19 distinct raw materials totalling 61 units, plus 61 crystals.

That bill outweighs 13,148 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,392 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 55 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 20 Fire Cluster, 15 Earth Cluster, 10 Wind Cluster and 3 other kinds.

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

9 of the 19 raw materials come out of the ground, and 8 of them are time-gated: Luminium Ore (6:00, 18:00), Star Cotton Boll (4:00, 16:00) and 6 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

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