Initiate's Gloves

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Initiate's Gloves is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Aldgoat Leather ×2 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 489 of the 1,844 Leatherworker ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 2 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 3 Earth Shard and 1 Wind Shard.

Every step is Leatherworker work, from a Lv 17 intermediate up to the Lv 20 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

1 of the 3 raw materials matches a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 2 come from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.

Of the intermediates, Aldgoat Leather has the widest use: 98 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.