Sophic Barding ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Sophic Barding is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Gold Ingot ×3, Cashmere Cloth ×2, Scintillant Ingot ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 11 distinct raw materials totalling 43 units, plus 32 crystals.

That bill outweighs 12,178 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,953 of the 2,216 Goldsmith ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 26 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Wind Cluster, 11 Fire Cluster, 4 Lightning Cluster and 1 other kind.

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

4 of the 11 raw materials come out of the ground, and 4 of them are time-gated: Luminium Ore (6:00, 18:00), Gold Ore (9:00) and 2 others. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

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