Deepgold Shield

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Deepgold Shield is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 3 intermediates — Deepgold Ingot ×2, Cobalt Ingot ×1 and Stonegold Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 18 units, plus 35 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,380 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 694 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 12 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 23 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 12 Fire Crystal, 6 Earth Crystal, 6 Ice Crystal and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 73, Blacksmith to Lv 72 and Goldsmith to Lv 72 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 5 raw materials are gathered, and one of them is time-gated: Gold Ore (9:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Cobalt Ingot has the widest use: 145 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.