Bluespirit Tower Shield

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Bluespirit Tower Shield is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Bluespirit Tile ×2, Darksteel Nugget ×1, Manasilver Nugget ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 7 distinct raw materials totalling 22 units, plus 46 crystals.

That bill outweighs 8,402 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 808 of the 1,441 Armorer ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 13 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 33 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 17 Fire Crystal, 11 Wind Crystal, 7 Ice Crystal and 2 other kinds.

The chain crosses three disciplines — Armorer to Lv 75, Blacksmith to Lv 74 and Goldsmith to Lv 74 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

All 7 raw materials are gathered, and one of them is time-gated: Darksteel Ore (1:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Darksteel Nugget has the widest use: 121 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.