Brass Ring

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Brass Ring is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Brass Ingot ×1 and Ragstone Whetstone ×1 — which resolve to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 564 of the 2,216 Goldsmith 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 Wind Shard and 1 Fire Shard.

Every step is Goldsmith work, from a Lv 6 intermediate up to the Lv 20 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 3 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Brass Ingot has the widest use: 94 recipes call for it, spanning seven of the eight crafting classes.