Black Willow Armillae of Fending ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Black Willow Armillae of Fending is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Black Willow Lumber ×2, Grade 3 Reisui of Vitality ×1 and Palladium Nugget ×1 — which resolve to 9 distinct raw materials totalling 17 units, plus 17 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,161 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 692 of the 1,552 Carpenter ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 13 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Wind Crystal, 4 Ice Cluster, 4 Wind Cluster and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Carpenter to Lv 70, Alchemist to Lv 70 and Goldsmith to Lv 68 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 9 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Black Willow Log (4:00, 16:00) and Gyr Abanian Spring Water (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 6 Eorzean hours, about 18 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Palladium Nugget has the widest use: 129 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.