My gf's character ended up being as nasty powerful as I was expecting it to be.
She ended up tying all of her beast change abilities to an item of power, which ended up giving her an extra point of refresh as well... at the cost of potentially losing /all/ of her supernatural abilities in the future. :evil:
But yeah, she was throwing out an average of 6 shift attacks with a 6 shift weapon. Every time. I think she killed 4 out of the 5 enemies the group encountered.
Granted, I had the first session be kind of an old school dungeon crawl so everyone could get used to the system. I think some of the most fun I had as GM was compelling my white court vampire PC who doesn't know that he is a vampire to activate whatever powers I told him to for each scene.
Everyone at the table got a good number of compels. I think that everyone at the table has learned how to do maneuvers and such now and everyone is aware of how powerful they are now. I ended up letting the techno savant PC use his lightning power for maneuvers and it was cool when he blinded a couple of goblins with it.
I think it's cool that the group was able to pick up the system so fast. Now I can start with the /real/ story and start bringing in more interesting enemies.
Goblins and malks are not all that great of a challenge to a submerged group.
But yeah... my gf's character could soak up massive amounts of damage and put out massive amounts of damage, but still have decent social skills as a human. I think the only fate points she spent was denying my compels that would have not let her change into a were giant cat since she is new to her powers.
So for all you new players out there, or gms who have a new player that does not know what they want to play, a were animal is really quite nasty for a relatively low amount of refresh.