One common and effective mitigation against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is to set the HTTPOnly flag on session cookies. This will generally prevent an attacker from stealing users' session cookies with XSS. There are ways of circumventing this (e.g. the HTTP TRACE method), but generally speaking, it is fairly effective. That being said, an attacker can still cause significant damage without being able to steal the session cookie.
A variety of client-side attacks are possible, but an attacker is also often able to circumvent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protections via XSS and thereby submit various forms within the application. The worst case scenario with this type of attack would be that there is no confirmation for email address or password changes and the attacker can change users' passwords. From an attacker's perspective this is valuable, but not as valuable as being able to steal a user's session. By reseting the password, the attacker is giving away his presence and the extent to which