Courtly Lover's Shield ★★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Courtly Lover's Shield is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Double Duraluminum Ingot ×1, Grade 4 Gemsap of Vitality ×1 and Rose Garnet ×1 — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 19 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,589 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 733 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 6 Earth Cluster, 6 Fire Cluster, 3 Ice Cluster and 3 other kinds.

The chain crosses four disciplines — Armorer to Lv 100, Alchemist to Lv 100, Blacksmith to Lv 100 and Goldsmith to Lv 100 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

5 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and 3 of them are time-gated: Dense Aluminum Ore (10:00, 22:00), Rose Garnet Ore (0:00, 12:00) and 1 other. The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 8 Eorzean hours, about 23 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Rose Garnet has the widest use: 45 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.