Facet Sabatons of Fending ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Facet Sabatons of Fending is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Grade 2 Vitality Alkahest ×2, Tungsten Steel Ingot ×2 and Ethereal Silk ×1 — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 20 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,926 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 881 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 16 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Earth Cluster, 4 Fire Cluster, 4 Lightning Cluster and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 80, Alchemist to Lv 80, Blacksmith to Lv 80 and Weaver to Lv 80 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

3 of the 7 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Ethereal Cocoon (8:00, 20:00) and Tungsten Ore (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 10 Eorzean hours, about 29 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Tungsten Steel Ingot has the widest use: 113 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.