I'm sure it's been suggested before that we have a feature in the game that teaches players how to perform the tank, healer, and DPS roles of the game. However, most will probably ignore this feature unless it was mandatory, and if it was mandatory people would whine about having to do it on new characters. So how about a compromise?
My idea is to have a difficulty that's intended to be tailored towards being balanced for one player and multiple NPCs, perhaps members of the undaunted? This will be a solo-only instance of the dungeon, so you can't just bring a full group of skilled players and just stomp everything even easier than in normal mode, while still allowing players to complete content solo if they desire. Once a player enters the dungeon in Training/Solo Mode, they will be prompted to speak to an NPC to say what role they intend to play, the other roles being filled by NPCs.
All that'd have to be done is to add NPCs to fill in the traditional healer - tank - damage - damage roles for dungeons, and possibly even two tanks - two healers - eight damage for trials if they wish to add this for trials as well. They'd of course have to program the mechanics into the NPCs for each dungeon, but I'm sure it's within the realm of possibility! ZOS will also have to add in prompts to tell a player what the mechanic is for a boss as it happens and what to do about it. This is a feature for some dungeons already actually, like Ruins of Mazzatun where Chudan gets ready to charge. And don't tell me that NPCs can react fast enough to dungeon combat, after all guards have faster abilities than most NPCs, and they can respond to CC abilities like a player can. It will take work to design NPCs capable of performing their role well in a dungeon, but again I'm sure it's possible!
Now I'm sure some of you may worry that people will just use this to farm gear instead of running dungeons over and over. For one, players that just want the gear and don't want to play with a group to get it will no longer be stuck with a group and players that actually want to play in groups won't have to worry about someone who isn't up for team play. Another thing is that with my idea players will be unable to get monster helms much like you can't get them in normal mode. Also, with how I envision this system, players will only be able to loot green-quality set items from this difficulty mode, and will be unable to receive the XP bonus from daily random dungeons with this difficulty. It would also make sense to not allow it to count for undaunted pledges, which can be explained by saying that the undaunted is providing you with backup instead of you forming your own group with other adventurers, disqualifying it from counting for pledges.
I feel like a difficulty mode like this would both be great news to players who either don't enjoy group content or don't know enough people who want to run dungeons often, and serve as an excellent way to teach the players mechanics for dungeons in-game rather than rely on players or outside sources to spread the information.
What do you all think? Any ideas? Suggestions to make it better? Reasons why this shouldn't be a thing? Let's hear it all!