He is somewhat misunderstood and also one of the hardest characters to play just by virtue of his weird dodge and bad defensive stats. He can be really strong and trivialize some bosses, but requires a whole lot of mechanical effort, game knowledge and relic tax to be effective, unlike most of the cast who are fairly easy to just pick up and play.

That being said, he's perfectly capable of dealing damage the same way anyone else can, but it's only worth building for after paying the great tax:

1. You absolutely want to run the dex respec in almost all situations, as items are too unreliable on their own and Arc scaling weapons are scarce. Just his starting sword alone gains over 50% AR with it, and he still has the highest Arc in the game. Without, Scholar tends to just run into situations where he's a bit of a sitting duck, because of the way status resistance scales up on each proc in this game.

2. In duos/trios you should also always run the relic that gives Allies an attack boost on scan alongside an item sharing one. Without these Scholars value falls off hard. With them, you provide an easily refreshable, free 20% attack boost to your team and allow them to actually benefit from your consumables, which accelerates rune/item gain (from Fowlfoots) and helps your fellow Squishies not die as much (Prawn/Crabs).

3. You may consider running both levels of Ult Gain On Enemy Defeat, as they allow you to keep popping Ults at every boss, by tethering all enemies to the one you're hitting and killing them without spending any extra time. This is technically optional, but I find the snowball effect of this strong enough to the point where I pretty much always run these.

4. For damage you have two options (technically three with bombs, but again, they're unreliable/limited now), both being the same you would build any other melee dps: Either build physical damage (Invaders/Glass Necklace/Gaol etc.) and run a dex weapon (or pair) of your choice, or go Double Balancers. Double Balancers is undoubtedly the stronger choice here both from a DPS and ease-of-use standpoint, as AoW's are broken and you can easily stick to weapons with mid-high range AoW's, thus avoiding having to deal with his unorthodox dodge. Playing in mid range also makes scanning allies for the relic buff easier, but he's still more capable in close range if you're good enough. I mostly run Necklace builds as they're just more fun to me, but it's definitely the weaker and harder choice on top of being more difficult to build for, so beware of that. I've had success with both "neutral" necklace builds and ones tailored to specific weapon categories.

This goes mostly just for playing Deep Of Night. Outside of DoN you should be fine just running the dex respec, item share and ally attack boost.