So I am a fairly new player who just finished leveling this account, I was sort of lost and didn’t know how to upgrade my gear in a fast manner and so I went to the auction cost and purchased gear to make it so my item level is a little over 300. Did I cheat myself? Did I miss an experience that I needed to do myself? I know this might be stupid lol, I just don’t know why I feel some sort of guilt.
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The gear you can get from the AH would best be described as “starter gear.” So, you still have plenty of gearing up to do, and haven’t missed anything.
As a point of reference, world quest gear rewards (which are pretty casual friendly) top out at ilvl 420. Regular dungeons at max level drop ilvl 400 I think. (And the harder organized group content drops in the mid to high 400s.)
To be perfectly honest, doing quests out in the world is fairly miserable until you start getting towards the mid 300s. Naz’jatar is rough until the mid to high 300s. The 8.3 content in Uldum and Vale of Eternal Blossoms is tuned towards the high 300s to low 400s.
So, as you can see, you still have lots of room to grow, and have cheated yourself out of nothing.
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Except perhaps a bit of gold 
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Gear only serves a purpose to make things easier and lets you access more challenging content. It’s possible to go from fresh 120 to geared to do LFR Ny’alotha in just a few days. However, you need a few things before you can start that.
The first thing is to quest in Nazmir until you become at least friend with Taljani Expedition. This will allow you to open up world quests that will get you better gear.
I’m not sure which experience you think you’re missing out, but if you want to experience the whole story, then step two is for you! In order to be able to fly in BfA areas, you need to complete Loremaster (all the main story quests in each zone) and do a few other achievements related to questing/exploring. Each zone will take about 4-5 hours of questing.
You can go back and do the same thing for WoD and Legion content as well (or do those leveling other characters).
Once you have World Quests opened up, you’ll have a lot of quests to upgrade your gear. What is available scales with how you are geared, up to about 430 or so. You can also do normal dungeons, heroic dungeons, and LFR once you have enough gear to queue. Once you make it to about 350 ilvl it’s safe to open up Naz’jatar, which will give you 385 gear. This should push other World Quests above 400 ilvl. Keep doing WQ until you’re about 420 ilvl or so, then do the legendary cloak quest. You can do it a little earlier, but it’s easy to solo at 420 as a hunter. You can also do the invasions in Vale and Uldum before you get the cloak, and those will give you good upgrades too. Be sure to watch your corruption level because it’s annoying to have to get out of the void zone and the thing from beyond is deadly if you’re not lasered in on it.
On any future characters you level it becomes a lot easier because you can send them a full set of Benthic gear (385 Naz’jatar) to start with. Plus, you only have to open up WQ on one character and they’re available for the rest of your account. Same with flying.
tl;dr You didn’t miss out on anything. Gearing is it’s own game beyond getting to 120 and you’ve got plenty left to do!