I see what you’re saying with the similarities here, but I do not agree that changes are warranted in the manner described above, nor do I concur that these are “Fire Strike” skills.
Part of the strength of Grim Dawn is that similar skills behave differently because of the context that surrounds them; the masteries they are in, the items that support them, the damage types they provide access to, etc. Savagery and Righteous Fervor are literally the same skill templates. Yet because they provide inherent access to different WPS, and because the items that empower these skills take builds in different directions, the skills feel different to play.
PRM is in a relatively fine state because its cold/lightning damage synergizes inherently with TSS casts, and its Fire/Aether damage synergizes inherently with Callidor’s/Devastation casts. These are two ‘halves’ to Arcanist that PRM can lean into depending on how you want to shake out your itemization.
DEE is in a sorry state mostly because its item support has always been terrible and Occultist is, ultimately, a pet mastery with some standalone playerscaling skills that don’t interact with one another. I’ve gone so far as to recreate Occultist when the mod tools came out because I’ve always seen the mastery as being mistakenly implemented on a fundamental level, but that isn’t DEE’s fault - the skill is a victim of the mastery’s design. It is also a victim of having some of the worst item support in the game; the Dreeg set has never once been interesting in a decade of Grim Dawn, and is entirely anti-synergistic with DEE despite providing bonuses to it, whereas at least Iskandra and Ludrigan have had some time in the sun now and then.
If you want to make DEE more interesting, make it better by improving its surroundings.
Would I turn my nose up at forking/orbiting/funny projectile skills in general? No. But I don’t think such changes are likely this late into development, especially when descriptions of such behavior would incur additional translation/localization requirements. I, therefore, don’t like relying on mechanical changes as being the only suggestible solution to a skill’s problems. I wandered down that road with Cadence, and Zantai’s approach was to just make the numbers on the skill and its items bigger, and now Cadence is significantly more playable.
For what it’s worth, Grim Armory made its own version of the DEE set…
