Abyssal Barding ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Abyssal Barding is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Ilmenite Ingot ×2 and Spodumene ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 24 units, plus 24 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 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 18 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 9 Earth Cluster, 9 Fire Cluster, 3 Ice Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 90, Blacksmith to Lv 90 and Goldsmith to Lv 90 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Ilmenite (8:00, 20:00) and Raw Spodumene (8:00, 20:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Ilmenite Ingot has the widest use: 73 recipes call for it, spanning six of the eight crafting classes.