Solo Dungeons in the game could be cool for people who want to play alone. Yes people could argue and say why the the hell do you then play MMO games which are supposed to/or should be social and group inteneded. But the reality is just that some people prefer playing solo, others pvp, and there are the ones that only play grouped content
How could it be implemented?
Make an option in the existing group finder that connects to the solo dungeon version. The items that drops could be the same as in the grouped version or a little bit lower gearscore than normal (5-10 lower) or completely new items
Final Fantasy XIV handles this by allowing you to generate an NPC party to run a dungeon with which is a pretty good way to “solo” dungeons without requiring some kind of balancing or separate dungeons.
It also prevents situations like the healer disconnecting before the final boss and being totally screwed…which happened to me the other day.
I switched to a fresh start server and have had an easier time getting parties for dungeons. Still it can take 30 minutes or more and for someone with limited session time it can be challenging to run these dungeons.
An NPC dungeon run could be nice and maybe you get lower XP or gear as you mentioned.
I think it’s inevitable that they do something like this because the core game mechanics of respec vs. multi character means there is nobody to run those lower level dungeons. Also as a tank it’s a bad game experience to run those lower level dungeons with lvl 60s because they pull aggro and you don’t get the experience of properly managing aggro…as a healer it’s also bad because it’s just a free for all. So yeah I don’t know what the answer is unless you just reset servers all the time.