I cannot seem to find a reference to many realistic ranger builds (of course there is the notorious fighter/ranger build) that I would like to play so I will post my own build here
'>.
First off I play the citadel by jim grimsley, 60+ hrs, heavy magic, heavy hack'n slash, and high stratagy/planning required along with a high dying tolerance. I am not a power gamer, those are boreing, I am a rp tho, that does play a very hard mod. that said here it is.
Ranger: the rest of the levels (about 12-15 ish in the citadel)
Shadowdancer: lvl 10
Weapon Master: lvl 7
I took ranger until lvl 8 or 9 ish until I could take shadowdancer levels, grabbing all the feats for shadowdancer first then grabbing the feats for wm when I could. Same with the skill points. I grabbed Weapon finese when I could. After the points are all set where you would need them for both sd and wm, just place the others where you want.
I took shadow dancer for the hide in plain sight, shadow evade abilities amoung the other feats you get and skill points. Weapon master was for damage
'>. Ranger was for fun.
The stats were placed so that wis was at 14 (to cast max lvl ranger spells), Dex, constitution, intelligence were also at 14. str was at 12, char was at 10.
The main stat of focus is dex in this build so that is where all the stat points went after creation and the weapon of focus was the rapier because it is finessable (weapon finesse feat) and has a good crit.
With this build I can "hide" if I am in trouble, sneek up on the enemy, keep a fairly high ac, dual weild rapiers, deal good damage, and have some spells to disable the enemy or heal my party.
Skill points were focused in hide, move silently, disapline, heal, intimidate, tumble, you get the picture.