It’s been years since I played the game but I don’t remember ARR being that fantastic in terms of story. It did a lot of interesting world-building but in terms of actual story-telling, it was mostly like “Okay, the Empire is here and they’re bad, and their bad god-killing robot is really bad, so go beat up the Empire”. Seems like mostly a lot of justification to setup the initial raid, which is totally fine, but WoW does basically the exact same thing - all of the Revendreth lore leads up to Castle Nathria, and then you raid Castle Nathria.