Do as much as you can do without Shadowlands first. Shadowlands generally has very little in terms of worldbuilding/lore quests.
There’s a lot of lore to catch up on with Legion. And you’ll spend a ton of time there. I think my idea may work best for you. Just remember to use Chromie and pause your XP or you’ll end up level 50 real fast.
Also keep in mind that Shadowlands may go on sale for the holidays, so I’d wait and see.
Legion lore is good and there’s a lot of it with almost nothing of importance removed. BfA cut out and changed huge chunks of lore and half of it doesn’t make sense now. Shadowlands retconned a lot of lore and removed some of it already to make it confusing, as well.
I just wanna note that you dont HAVE to stop EXP to still enjoy it, its just that the quests will become trivial, but thats a preference option … ME, i can enjoy it no matter what level or gearing im at. I can see both sides of that coin.
In Legion you had the main storyline, plus the individual Class Halls questlines. The class halls quests aren’t necessarily part of Legion lore. You could get by doing one class hall and the Legion questline.
In BfA there were two stories, the Alliance and the Horde. Both war campaigns were interesting, I think it’s certainly worth while to run through a character on each side.
In SL there’s the 4 covenants with their individual questlines tied in to the overall arc. They’re worthy enough to run a toon through each covenant (or the same toon switching covenants).
The alt catch up stuff in 9.1.5 doesn’t really impact this much at all, as you really need to have done all of the Covenant questlines to take advantage of it.
Lore wise, there’s no reason level Renown, however. Just run the Covenants. Do the Chains of Domination questline (shared across all covenants in 9.1), and a quick trip through LFR. With Chains of Domination, you don’t even need to run LFR.
If you take a single toon in SL, level it up to 60, finish the Covenant campaign, grind a bit of Anima and Renown to get the 197 Covenant gear, then you’re more than geared up enough to quickly run through the other stories. You can easily blow through a Covenant campaign in a weekend if you wanted to. So, you can “eat all of SL” in probably 6 weeks of dedicated game play if you’re up for it, since all of the time gates are down.
If you’re grinding character power, it’s a different story. But for just questing it can go pretty quickly.
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I’d lock at 45 and finish legion, then get to 50 to finish BfA. Then I’d buy shadowlands.
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not a bad idea!
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Don’t go play something else, you are very welcome.
Unpopular opinion but SL is fine the first time through although it gets less fun once you’re a cap. Sounds like some of that might be addressed next patch, but who knows. Anyway, I just piddle around in game these days so I’m not expecting as much as I used to and my expectations are probably lower than most others.
Don’t let others tell you what’s fun. Play it yourself.
Don’t take any advice from blood elf heresy in these threads.
Suramar was a pain to navigate.
BFA is great because of Zandalar, and shadowlands is great until you get into the dumb Torghast grind
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I can respect this 
good reply
Legion was awesome. BFA was “meh”.
…for the love of the Light stay away from Shadowlands. It’s horribad. Just explore Legion to your heart’s content, and pray that the next xpack is better.