Can you solo the apex dungeons?

[DaLagga]

So I ran a few of these earlier and barely did anything as everyone basically just blitzed through and completed everything by the time I had arrived to collect the essence. Is there a way to just play solo? I never opted to join a group, but it always puts me in one automatically.

[Saul]

Create your own card.

[Natjur]

The vaults at the watch are public, just make your own vault card and go solo.

The last boss is not too hard if you have the right gear (no need for the 'cheat' gear)

Left is desert which is faster and easy, so this one gets spammed.
Most right is forest and annoying so most do not do this one

[stretch]

This may not be totally accurate as I have no real way to test it but I noticed that most people tended to use the left portal. The few times I tried the other portals I was pretty much alone.

You can do your own for sure with a card but I read a post where someone claimed the reward at the end was nowhere near what the public ones give.
For now I suggest you just enjoy the ride and farm the effort free essences by letting others do all the work. Gear up and get into the 220 extreme difficulty realms ASAP and you can get a lot more essences there on your own without having to solo that stupid end boss all the time. It's boring for sure but many times you will get to contribute by finding the hidden red spots and stuff so it's not a total waste. Even with a few people you can usually do something to help.
In part it depends how old the mission is when you get put into it. If you are first in you might get to do a couple of areas before anyone else catches up or you might be last in and just get to run through picking up free essence.
Either way you need lots of essences to gear up and a busy run is cake. Takes the edge off needing so many.

You might get 300ish essence per run in the Watch depending on the events that it generates but you can get almost that in one fae tower in a 220 zone and they are much faster to do. The top floor of a fae tower gives 140 and each lower floor is 70. Defence and the insight (7 trigger things) give 140 but I avoid those as too complex to bother with. The 3 tone trigger ones give 35 which is the most basic PoI.