My Night Widow was my first character to 50, through soloing story missions (it's red side in Australian times so I didn't even see any groups) making cross-comparisons difficult. On teams I find it difficult to estimate whether the buffs I bring balance out my DPS. I assume it is lower than a dedicated DPS character (scrapper or stalker) but I hope it is not too much lower and the buffs I bring are not just being wasted on characters already at cap, as a lot of the players are pretty well IO'd out.
The AoE options seem fairly fiddly and not that impressive. In teams things die really fast and I'm pretty sure it's not me. Spin has a long animation and seems to miss everything a surprising amount. Eviscerate needs a close target to fire and then has an extremely small range and long animation both of which make it more difficult to use well in a grouped environment. Dart burst has a better range but a long animation. I only got it fairly late too (there's a lot of useful buffs to get) so I often lose it when playing at a reduced level. I can see why the access to larger AoE's with very useful side-effects, plus better range, encourage the dominance of fortunata's. Seeing a forum post say they feel sad seeing a night widow because it's wasted potential was a bit discouraging ... but melee is fun. And I think buffs plus being able to apply high single target data to a high value opponent is useful enough.
The soldier inherent certainly isn't very interesting and I can't tell how useful it is because it is extremely passive. I do have a lot of toggles to run though.
I think most widow builds, where slots are tight anyway, have little reason to draw from the very limited pool of patron powers available to them. Certainly I have never seen a widow build with any of them.
I don't mind the combat pajama's outfit and it being unique, more claw options might be nice though. One thing I noticed is that if you save your costume and then try to "fix" it so you can load your body type into another slot it loses those settings. So my widow has glam hair and face 14 but all my slots have default face and medium hair that remains when I try to load the costume from slot 1 into it.