I have played over 30 lives of ranger 95% of those were melee, come to think of it, probably more than 30. Most of those were Tempest 41 AP, 31 AP in deepwood. Dex based with Scimitar. Done. The other stuff is trying to make things work that you have an idea for. Look at tier 4 tempest, you can have your dex mod added to your defense with dodge bonus, dex for evasion, armor class......Look at the cores.... fort bypass among other things like double strike. The debuff of deepwood at level 18 is amazing. Debuff on raid boss for whole raid group? It's amazing for team players interested in success and not the kill lead. This past week I have been thinking hard on-going ranger again and doing tempest with vistani knife fighter. In my opinion I think this could be the best currently, with the capstone in vistani and the tier five in tempest. This could let you take two levels in some multiclass because no ranger capstone is used and grab low hanging fruit somewhere.