Charge

The dragon chooses the nearest player between 30 and 150 blocks away and quickly charges at them, dealing very high damage and knockback.

A dragon charging at an unprepared player

Fireballs

Flies towards a random outpost and rapidly shoots at players with explosive dragon fireballs. Fireballs leave behind dragon's breath.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

The dragon preparing its fireball attack

Lightning

Flies to a high location, then after a few seconds of warning, strikes all exposed players with devastating true damage.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

The player getting struck by lightning (easy difficulty!)

Enraged Charge

Charges at nearby players multiple times in quick succession, at an even faster speed than normal charges.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

Slowly falling into the void after getting charged at by a dragon...

A very menacing creature

Health: 40.0
Armor: 2/4 Netherite, Protection IV
Follow Range: 192.0m

Mount Health: 75.0
Mount Armor: Netherite Horse Armor
Mount Speed: Very Fast
Mount Step Height: 3.0m

This miniboss spawns once every few minutes, depending on the amount of fighting players.

The skeleton switches between a bow, a spear and a sword depending on its distance to its target. Its horse is pretty fast and can run up walls up to 3 blocks tall, meaning it can scale an end spike in a matter of seconds.

An indestructible end crystal orbits it until it gets killed, after which the crystal explodes. The dragon can heal from this crystal.

End crystals within a 12-block radius of it become immune to damage.

A variant of this without a horse spawns after the dragon reaches half health, on each of the 10 end crystals. They shoot down players in the arena with very high accuracy.

A crystal protector guarding an end crystal

  – Hyper heal activates after dragon isn't damaged for a long time
 – Dragon's breath buffs endermen with strength II and speed II
 – Dragon's breath destroys items
 – Headshots do 2x damage
 – Immune to one-cycling and needs at least 5 hits to kill
 – Dragon fight fog removed
 – Dragon fight bossbar style changed
 – Dragon perching chance reduced
 – Bedrock burns soul fire instead of fire
 – Custom dragon-related death messages
 – Higher chance of endermites appearing from ender pearls

Recommended gear:
 – Maxed out netherite/diamond armor
 – A strong sword with looting III
 – Bow with power V and several stacks of arrows
 – A strong spear
 – An enchanted mace (optional)
 – A fast pickaxe
 – Many totems of undying
 – Several stacks of ender pearls
 – Several stacks of blocks
 – A stack of wind charges
 – 2+ stacks of nutritious food
 – Golden apples for emergency healing
 – Elytra (with rockets) if you have one

Hide under blocks to avoid the lightning attack. On hard mode this does 8.5 hearts of true damage, so it's definitely worth dodging.

The dragon is extremely fast, so shooting it from an elevated point is easier than from the surface of the end island.

Try to not stand too close to the Crystal Protector when you kill it. The explosion is usually enough to kill/pop you even in full netherite.

There's no shame in switching the difficulty to easy or normal. The fight was designed to be extremely difficult.