tepid loom
As many may know, the dragon fight is actually hardest part in hardcore runs usually. Unlike the overworld or the nether where deaths are often due to mental mistakes or carelessness, the end is actually somewhat designed to kill you. It wastes your time by making you kill the crystals, the dragon swoops in at you to knock you up, it is immune to range attacks while perched and it sends people flying who try to melee it wrong. And the “recently” added dragon breath that absolutely shreds your health. All while the endermen that any one of the group members may easily aggro absolutely tears through your health.
The point is, trial and error to try to get better at the dragon fight is… optimistic at best. Forget prep, even if you spawn every world in the end with everyone fully geared in diamond armour and bows, it may still take a number of hours to win without someone dying. And right now, even if we only take the best runs duration, you are only getting 1 attempt at the end every 3 hours if everything goes right.
My suggestion is, just practice. Load up the end fight and try to beat it with neuro. At this point, no one will complain or call it cheating to practice. And I promise, this game is not getting beat without practicing the end. If you practice and beat it first few tries, then fair enough I was wrong, and if it takes multiple hours, then you would really be glad you practiced first. The main reason against this is that you want to brute force the end fight via many attempts and failures for content. No rebuttal needed from me regarding that argument.
At the very least, I will support the idea of practicing the end fights. Does anyone else agree?