change to for your build for the humanform limit, to work in toughness and fix my typos:

Against any creature with 5 or more refresh spent on supernatural powers, full powers manifest.
Against minor supernatural beings 3 or 4 refresh of powers, only Inhuman Strength,Tough+claws
Against those with 2 refresh, the character gets only Inhuman Strength,Toughness
Against those with 0 (eg, wizard constitution) or 1 refresh, the character gets only Claws.
Refresh cost is calculated without considering bonuses similar to catch, item of power or human form.
Each of these is dropped by one step if the character has not been following a righteous path.  This effect can stack.)

Also changed "player" to "characer".  God in DFRPG doesn't care if the player is a bad person, as long as the character behaves well

Re: Guide my Hand  - my character was explicitly a wrestler who fought barehanded, so the holy touch was pretty vital to the concept.  In your case, Guide My Hand is better and, with Righteousness, should give him a fair amount of extra out of combat utility if he's got fate points and a free pass to always be present whenever supernatural mayhem goes down.  The Righteousness Desperate Hour is also one of the very few ways for a melee thug to get an area attack, even if it is only mostly useful for sweeping away minions....minions are something high shift/melee type characters have trouble dealing with quickly.

I edited the above to explain it better.  Feel free to steal it.  I got the idea from the Sword of the Cross power, but skinned to not automatically work.  OTOH, it's better for dealing with things like a car dropped on you by an angry wizard, or escaping a grapple from Magog.

DFRPG is a game where channeling or evocation can just bring more boom than anyone else, hands down, and also a game where rituals/thaumaturgy can tend to overshadow everything else in noncombat situations.   The game has a lot in common with Ars Magica that way, although non-spellcasters have a lot more scope to be mighty than a companion or grog.

The channeling spellcaster is something you just have to accept is going to get in his hits, unless you can lock him down or ambush him somehow.  Wave attacks are a good approach, and just having bad guys willing to turn big shift hits into consequences that the non-wizards can then tag, instead of being taken out can do quite a bit.  Also if your bad guys have any fate points when the fight is over that didn't come from losing the fight, you're not using their full potential.  The best way to deal with a huge shift wizard attack is to spend fate like mad until the targeting roll misses.

The main defense against thaumaturgy is pacing - keep the tension up so the ritual dude has to rely on their basic abilities most of the time, rather than always being able to stack a bunch of extra things up for the high grade thaumaturgy.  Also remember the limitations, primarily the need for a connection.  The skill monkeys in the party help you MAKE connections, making thaum possible at all, even if it as crude as the cop arresting somebody, taking their fingerprints and getting them to state their name while the wizard is watching....

Actually, Our World and Your Story are quite clear on this point.  Standard magic immunity catch is "immune to mortal magic, not mundane sources of harm", also phrased as "immune only to mortal magic". It's consistent with every character that's demonstrated it in the books, and for that matter, ways of bypassing it, regardless of source, are also consistent in the Dresden Files stories.  This is how it is represented in this game, there is no "extra" weakness.

This is by the way, worth a +5 catch - both Madrigal and Lord Talos have magic immunity via magic items, and get a +1 for the item, +5 for the catch cost break on physical immunity.  Real Ogres just get the immunity straight up, it costs them only 3 refresh and it has no weaknesses beyond "it isn't mortal magic".

What that catch seems to mean is NOT "all spells fail near you if they cause anything bad to happen, directly or indirectly".  It means based on the books "you can not target them with magical energy and have it work, regardless of the shifts you generate.  Anything around them, however, is fair game".   Another way of thinking about it might be that you can't make a magical connection to them...not with a focus (hair, blood, etc) nor with line of sight a;though that causes issues with the famous Maggie death curse.  So I like the former definition better.

Maggie bypassed the catch by using a blood connection to Raith (Harry and Thomas) and explicitly wording the spell so that Lord Raith wasn't the target, but instead the life energies of those he interacted with were the target.  Which in a RPG would probably be rules lawyering, but Maggie's player clearly was that kind of person

Well, it is the same principle as why sunlight reflects off a mirror but an x-ray goes right through it.

The only difference is wavelength and energy.

But then you know, particles are waves.....light isn't an especially easy topic either to bend your mind around.

There's a lot of overlap and really, many things Harry does are combinations of elements.  His Fuego rote nearly always has a "knockback" component, which clearly comes from spirit, even though he uses his blasting rod to control it and thinks of it as fire.  Harry has perhaps read too many comic books, where "energy blasts" of various elements also knock enemies around.   He controlled lightning from a storm and thought of it as "fire" but it likely also used a bit of earth (for magnetism/targeting) and air (for weather).   Carlos might have managed that same effect a completely different way, focusing perhaps on the amount of water in the atmosphere and channeling the bolt through the conductive medium.

The answer is, any element can do anything in the realm of a mechanical attack, maneuver, block and to a limited extent (control shifts are hard) move.  Harry, for example, has used Fozare on a number of occasions to give himself a "superleap" sort of power, but as he's crappy at control, it's always scary for him.   Because Blocks are allowed, blocks against perception are allowed, although they'll manifest differently than the "spirit veil of invisibility".   Fire could do very bright light, air or water might do fog, earth can raise a dust cloud....they all block vision, and probably interfere with enemy vision more than your own (as veil mechanics dictate) but the primary advantage of a spirit veil is that it's subtle (for that matter, Fozare type effects are a lot more subtle than ripping up the ground or manifesting tons of water that turn into ectoplasm later..spirit is subtle, that's its thing).    If you're wondering how I'd use fire as a movement power, well, you can make ice bridges over water obstacles, or probably even turn your feet into ice-skates if you douse them in water first.  If you're reasonably resistant to fire and abrasion you might even make an explosion that hurtles you in a direction.  Spirit, earth or air are better for leaping about, and water for moving IN water, or surfing on water.

The details of what you do dictates which focus items you can use, whether refinement/specialization works, whether your aspects help or hinder and of course how likely it is for your opposition to counter it, or the environment to enhance or hinder it.   The details also give hints to what fallout does, or what happens if a high shift attack misses its target and hits the environment instead.

If you're not going down the Channeling road, yeah, claws are a good idea.  You'll get much bigger shifts (and things like zonewide "punch everybody") tricks with channeling but you get all the baggage of spellcasting.  It's a matter of if you think high end superspeed should be exhausting.  It does depend on your flavor a lot though.  On a chronomancer claws would be more likely to be a temporal disruption as the "the world seems slow to me" approach rather than "I'm just super fast" approach lets you ignore most of the inconvenient physics aspects of going so fast...but also likely takes some of the flashier super speed powers (slipstreams, sonic booms and possibly even offensive use of superspeed as purely speed rather than some kind of chronal paradox effect) off the table.

If he goes down the Hermes road he's looking at speed of sound (fast as the wind) not speed of light, which likely means SU speed plus high athletics plus an aspect "fast as the wind" gets you cross country speeds without needing rituals, although obviously if you HAVE rituals/Superspeed or rituals/chronomancy your options increase.

Yup, get more bang for your buck. +1 conviction gives you the exact same damage as +1 discipline, but +1 discipline also increases your chance to hit.

While true, what makes wizard spells insanely powerful is the ability to add "outcome" shifts by just taking more mental stress.  Why reserve all the fun of that to non-rote spells .   Yeah, you want to crank that discipline up there, but you those higher boxes on your conviction stress chart are like free "bang" as long as you aren't so far behind your discipline that you start taking consequences making use of them when drawing power.

I mean, wizards ALSO can get a +4 to hit with a focus item, where the best a stunt can add is +1.  But the equivalent of just drawing an extra 3 power over conviction (checking 4th stress box instead of 1st) is a stunt AND a fate point (Deadly Blow).  And you can do both, with no extra skill investment needed beyond lore to improve the max quality of your foci.